As my once svelte and girlish figure once again approaches the size of a small manatee, I wonder if these are any good ? Experiences / recommendation etc
Good luck everybody. Have a good one.
Just got a charge HR just recently Dave... I do think it prompts you to move more and I like HR monitor as it gives you an idea as to how high impact your excercise... And it's reassuring to see that I have a relatively healthy resting heart (59)...Originally Posted by seikopath
I like it so far and it's very satisfying when it does its little 10k disco on your wrist...
I'm happy with it :-)
If you get one look me up and we'll have a weekend battle to see who has moved the most ;-)
Between my wife an I we have had a jaw bone 24 and 2 Fitbit HR all broke in less than 6 months .
We both wear Apple Watch now.
Of course I still wear a proper watch on the other wrist.
Apple Watch is ok at step counting but less good at other activities - an hour of squash didn't record . Suggestion is that V2 will correct this sort of problem and add other functionality
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I had Fitbit one, Fitbit flex and now Fitbit hr, but they just don't work for me. I travel a lot with a wheeled suitcase and it doesn't seem to count my steps if I wear it on the hand I hold the case with. The clip on type seem to keep carrying on counting when I'm sat on an aeroplane.
Ive got a fatbit hr and it's ok however I do wonder about its accuracy and how it measures certain features. I'm not the greatest of sleepers and I know from the wife I'm far from still in my sleep but my Fitbit regularly records I've done 100 steps Whilst I'm asleep.
My thoughts on a few here
http://forum.tz-uk.com/showthread.ph...ker-hrm-review
Also see dcrainmaker.com
Thanks, what are you currently using?
Good luck everybody. Have a good one.
I have the charge HR and like it as a motivational tool. I was a couch potato prior to getting it and it has definitely helped in getting me moving. The HR monitor is documented as not being overly accurate, but it is normally within 2bpm of the sensors on the gym equipment I use.
We also bought the bathroom scales and like the way they sync with the app.
The biggest issue I have with it is that I end up wearing it more than a watch now.
In your dreams! LOL
Have you got a smart phone Dave?
Most have apps for general fitness bits. I use mine to keep an eye on my steps and keep above 10K a day.
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Genius :)In your dreams! LOL
I started off with a Fitbit Charge, and eventually upgraded it to a Charge HR.
It works a treat for me, and sees me at my fittest for over 30 years.
Obviously not all down to the device, but it does encourage get up and go. I have 20 friends and family with them, and you can 'compete' against them.
As for build quality, Fitbit actively replace broken items. Their customer service is first class.
Perhaps it was 100 strokesIn your dreams! LOL
Lager and the pedometer in my iPhone, details later
Yes charge HR I think. Very good I think. No idea how accurate they are but it makes me more motivated. End up doing lots of daily and weekly challenges and gets to be a bit competitive in a nice way :-)
I do have a smartphone but I keep the 'where are you now' tracking thing switched off because it interferes with my tin foil baseball cap
Good luck everybody. Have a good one.
Good to hear, because the Amazon reviews are littered with " great but just stopped working after the first six weeks "
Good luck everybody. Have a good one.
I like manatees.
When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks long into you.........
The scales aren't very accurate - they often vary as much as two pounds - seems to be a known issue.
i invested in a watch for working out at the gym, just used in gym or if I went power walking for other sporty activity and found that better than any other things i tried eg fitbit!
Charge HR here. The iPhone app is brilliant and provides you with lots of relevant information. It's really motivated me to not only exercise more but drink more water and log my calorie intake...
I would agree with this. The app has consistently improved over time.
You can get involved as little or as much as you wish.
I have the following:
Fitbit
Charge HR, its good but prone to breaking,
Blaze, colour screen great but no gps so a no go for me and battery life not that good.
Garmin Vivo active HR good and does it all not the best looking.
735XT great at most things just feels cheap for the money.
Fenix HR, brilliant bulky and master of many trades.
Which I use most Fenix and Vivo active, battery life is the main reason I get about a 7-8 days out of mine.
Two years ago I bought a Nike Fuelband from SC.
No doubt this will be derided by all of the gym bunnies and fitness Gods on here, but it was bought for one reason, namely to give me a daily exercise target.
And for this purpose, it works. Brilliantly. I not only have a daily target, but a monthly target which encourages me to exceed the daily objective. And I also set myself a further increased objective to achieve one million "Fuel Units" per year, which I have also managed.
I wear it every day, and check progress throughout the day. I find that I "need" to hit my daily target, and if for any reason I fail to do so I feel that I've let myself down.
As a simple daily motivational tool it has far exceeded my expectations. My only concern, prompted by a recent change to the Nike Plus app is that they may be removing support for the Fuelband as it has been overtaken by newer technologies such as the Apple watch.
Manatees, mac and cheese. If anyone on this forum get's that reference without googling it I'll eat my hat.
I like the look of these fitbit things. Do all of them pair to a smart phone? Presume android is supported too? (yes I am being lazy but I needed to justify the quote somehow).
I've had one for about 8 weeks now (Fitbit Charge HR), it pairs fine with my Android phone. I quite like it, makes me realise how much I walk around during the day.
Dave E
Skating away on the thin ice of a new day
I bought the Mrs a Fitbit Alta the other week. A bit more feminine based but the black band one would be fine as looks a bit like the old Jawbone. Handy thing is pairing it with phone to receive text messages as well as all the usual calories, steps, miles etc.
I bought a Jawbone Up 2 in October 2015, and it is still going strong.
I work in London a couple of days each week, and it is astounding to compare a step count of 1000+ per day in the City with the feeble 200-300 when working from home.
I find the sleep function very useful for reminding me that I never do manage to get a full 8 hours !
They may not be accurate per-se, but do indicate a useful short-medium term trend in your activity and sleep patterns
Dear all,
My daughter, (11), has expressed an interest in one of these.
Any recommendations please.
Regards,
Ben
Fitbit Altea Ben... Nice funky colours!!!
There's also a new range that looks more like jewellery...
Ben
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Fitbit Altea Ben... Nice funky colours!!!
There's also a new range that looks more like jewellery...
Ben
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Fitbit Altea Ben... Nice funky colours!!!
There's also a new range that looks more like jewellery...
Ben
EDIT - so useful I said it three times!!!
In this week's Trust Me, I'm a Doctor they tested a number of those against a hospital machine and none one came even close to be accurate. A number of manufacturers are being sued because of this. Class action suits from the States, I think.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/6/107...-rate-tracking
That's interesting about not being accurate.
Thanks for the suggestions so far though.
Regards,
Ben
Thats very interesting , thank you very much for posting .
Unless she stick with things, I'd get the cheapest possible.
When my wife and I got Fitbits one daughter (aged 12) decided she wanted one we got her a Xiaomi Mi band. A little later my wife upgraded her Fitbit so other daughter (also 12) inherited the Fitbit Flex she's been asking about for weeks. Both are now sat in a drawer and have been for months.
For me, the absolute accuracy is not that relevant, whether it's HR or weight. These devices are used to monitor and change fitness and behaviour. If they're used over time, any offset or variance in the reading will level out over time. Unless any of us are boxers, jockeys or F1 drivers, none of us need accurate weight readings.
I have a Fitbit one that seems fairly good although being so small could easily be lost. Best of the cheaper ones says Which.
Fair point. Here's the link for you to decide for yourself.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/arti...-step-counters
A timely thread as I've been thinking about getting a cheapish heart rate monitor. I don't really care about anything else, but need a real-time HR monitor, not a passive tracker that shows you an activity graph or calorie counts. Don't care about any of that stuff at all.
Typical bad timing, I sold an Apple Watch in response to a WTB on here because I wasn't using it, then about a week later the need for this came up, as I'm starting to do a more serious weight training programme. For reasons, I have to be quite strict about not over-training, so a pulse monitor would be very useful.
I'm well aware of the limitations of optical on-the-wrist monitors as mentioned a few posts above, but for my purposes they should be OK. I recently looked into this, and found some original research. It was a fairly unscientific test where they only put one unit through a single set of tests, but even so the results were interesting. Even the worst-performing ones were accurate to within a few bpm of the medical monitor used as a control. So they aren't too bad, but this is only in very controlled circumstances.
It seems that there are three main problems affecting the accuracy. This can give very misleading results like showing 50% of the true bpm, which in some cases could be dangerous:
1. Sweating, or not having the band tight enough gives inaccurate readings.
2. Moving around, especially running, gives inaccurate readings.
3. Doing high-intensity exercise like HIIT can give misleading results because there is a lag time of around 20s, so you aren't getting an accurate "on the spot" reading.
Number (3) is the main reason Fitbit are getting into trouble I believe, because their advertising strongly makes out that the devices are appropriate for HIIT, even though their small print says they are not. Since the entire point of HIIT - if you are doing it properly - is to attain a dangerously high heart rate in short bursts, getting a wrong reading could have serious consequences.
These problems don't apply much to weightlifting other than (1) if you are repeatedly tensing and relaxing your wrist. But I don't care about that since I only need to know my HR after a rest period.
Anyway, aside from that information, all I was able to find by Googling was lots of paid "reviews" from the likes of T3, which are basically a bunch of regurgitated press releases, with very little actual objective reviewing going on. So I wasn't able to find out if there is in fact an inexpensive real-time HR monitor that doesn't require a cloud account or any other nonsense and doesn't use a chest strap (yes, these are more accurate, but in my case it wouldn't matter and it's too much hassle).
Anyone got something like this?
My other half has one of these (In fact I think it maybe a cheaper version as it was about £30), her only complaint is that when she is at her desk working it seems to add steps on from typing, filing etc when she hasn't actually taken a step.
She might be sat on the computer for an hour and it will say she has done 30 steps or so. Might just be a faulty one but chances are the novelty will wear off in a week or two and it will end up in a drawer!
So, to answer my own question, I spent quite some time looking into the various options and in the end I bought one of these, which arrived today:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/291855927850
You can buy them direct from China for about £5 less, but it'll take about a month to arrive and may incur VAT. I ordered mine at the weekend, so this guy genuinely does have UK stock. Most UK sellers seem to be charging about £20 more. This was the cheapest I could find.
Since it is Chinese, all the instructions are Chinese, but there's not a lot to it. You need to search for the Xiaomi app (Mi Fit it's called). The app is in English. Annoyingly, it requiring you to register your phone and create an account before you can use it, but then it allows you to configure the band (it is unclear whether any data is sent to a remote server automatically, so keep in mind that it probably is). The band itself only responds to single taps, which cycle through the modes. I've set mine to only display time, HR and battery level, since that's all I care about. Aside from that, it does most of the usual fitness tracker stuff and you can apparently link it up to other health apps. It'll even buzz for incoming calls and show some app notifications. However, I don't personally care about any of those things so I have left them off.
What I like, aside from the low cost, is that it's small and light, good quality, the bands are replaceable and most importantly, it has a real-time HR display. In fact it has a pretty decent monochrome OLED display, which is very readable. It doesn't seem to do passive pulse monitoring though: each time you want to check your heart rate, you need to tap it and wait a few seconds. Seems to take about 5 seconds to get a reading. It also specifically says you must not be moving, but all of these wrist-based HR monitors lose a lot of accuracy when moving, so a chest strap is far more appropriate if you care about staying in specific cardio zones. I'm not sure if it measures resting heart rate each day so you can use it to track your long-term fitness. I suppose I'll find out after I've been using it for a while.
Haven't used it in the gym yet either, but based on first impressions it's well worth 30-odd quid.
^^^^^
It's basically a Charge HR at 1/3 of the price
I really like the Fitbit App though and have now integrated the Fitbit scales with it too...
Yes the Fitbit app is very good, and constantly evolving and improving.
Easy to get your pals to join and challenge each other too - great incentives to do more exercise.
Samsung Gear FIT 2 bought off here. I did a lot of research and for me the Sammy is great. Its nice looking, comfortable, not bulky, has all the sensors you need, has auto activity detection and one of the best looking screens.
If I didn't have this if go for a Garmin vivosmart HR. Build quality on Fitbits and MS band 2 is pants.
This is certainly very true with Fitbit. I know of around 10 people who have had their Fitbit break, and sometimes the replacement then breaks too.
However, Fitbit has replaced every one with a brand new item.
Hopefully they are improving their build quality?
I think there answer to the disintegrating bands is to make them replaceable.
Very true, although Fitbit work purely on replacing the whole item, rather than attempting any fix.
There have been battery issues too, and again they just replace the whole Fitbit.
I've only used Garmin, but very happy with the one's I've used
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My wife has had various Fitbits that have all been replaced at some point under warranty, they certainly seem fragile. She had yet another replacement a few months ago and already there is an issue with it. To be fair Fitbit have replaced each without quibble.
She's thinking of going Garmin as all the ones I have had have lasted well.
Only ever used a Garmin and a cheapish one that other half bought me. Both worked well and that was a year or so ago, not used either since but that's down to me not working properly lol
For what it's worth, I've had an UP3 for just over a year now - I say 'an' UP3, I'm actually onto my 3rd. The first 2 broke at the strap clasp and the 3rd one has just snapped somewhere else on the strap and they're now refusing to warranty it because the original was bought over a year ago.
If they don't relent, I definitely won't be replacing it with another Jawbone.
These are mostly a waste of time and as others have mentioned (Trust Me, I'm a Doctor) they are very inaccurate.
I have been considering a HR monitor and if I do go for something it will be a chest band with a decent app.
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