A couple weeks ago, I was pretty excited to take my training to another level by purchasing a fitness tracker, the Fitbit Charge HR. It claimed to track your sleep, steps, calories burned, distance, as well as continual heart rate monitoring. I was excited to monitor and improve my training, nutrition, and sleep using this product, and It did most of those things very well, but not all.
The Fitbit was really easy and quick to set up. The app works well and has everything you could need, but I found a problem with the tracker itself. While it tracked my steps, sleep and distance traveled accurately, It did not accurately track or display my heart rate.
For everyday use, the heart rate reading was where it should have been, but once I went to the the gym or for a bike ride, the displayed heart rate was sometimes as far as 60 BPM off of my actually heart rate. It seemed to have trouble tracking anything above 140 bpm. I wasn’t the only person to have this problem, as an article was written about the problems with the Fitbit Surge. For the two weeks I had it, it only accurately (or close to) read my heart rate twice, and that was only on my long cardio workouts. It would not accurately track my heart rate in the gym, or when I was on the pump track or doing drills.
What’s so bad about that? Well, other than claiming to track your heart rate during exercise and not doing so, how can a device accurately track your calories burned if it doesn’t track your heart rate during exercise? It basically makes the device useless to me. The two most important features that I want don’t work.
After doing some more looking around, I found an article that stated that Fitbit claimed that the heart rate tracking was good enough for most people. I guess I’m just not most people.
If you’re the average to active person who is looking to be more active, this is a great device to track your sleep and activities, but if you’re a serious athlete, want detailed accuracy and are looking to track EVERYTHING, I do not suggest any of the Fitbit products.
I will be doing more research to find a product that will do everything I need it to do.
