Anyone else use Fitbit?

Spinningwoman

Barefooters
May 23, 2013
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I expect this is probably not really hard-core enough for all you serious runners<g> but the last couple of weeks I have been using a fitbit flex wristband which tracks activity - basically like a fancy pedometer that talks to a website. I bought it mainly for the silent vibrating alarm and the sleep tracking, as i sleep really badly at the moment, but I have also found it hugely useful and interesting to encourage me to walk and move more, especially as I'm trying to stick to never running consecutive days and not doing tmts. I had always assumed my lifestyle was fairly active even when not 'taking exercise' but now I can see that if I don't make a positive effort, even days when I run may not meet a 10000 step target. It also gives me something to obsess over on non running days!
 
There may not be too many other users anywhere yet as I was told a couple of weeks ago that the company had only managed to deliver about 1% of the orders they had received!
 
There's a massive number of them around, and all the usual paces here (uk) seem to have them - I know there have been delays getting different colour bands etc but the actual thing is there on amazon.
 
I like the idea of these things, but no GPS makes it less attractive to me. The sleep tracking thing seems like a good idea - I'm interested in giving that a go to see if it really does make a difference.
 
I'm not using it as an alternative to GPS, though. I would still use the gps for a proper run. What I like about the fitbit is that it scoops up all the rest of my activity, casual and planned, and let's me see how active I am. So on a day when I run, I might.be feeling quite smug, but actually my shorter runs are not enough to be the only activity I do that day. On a day when I don't run, I have to make a couple of non-essential walking decisions to get the activity in, especially on office days.
 
For sleep tracking it has two modes, normal and sensitive. Normal will register a disturbance if you get out of bed in the night but that's about all. If you sleep ok and just want to be accountable for getting enough sleep, that would work well. Sensitive mode probably overeports disturbance, if anything, but works well for me because I do sleep badly and I'm hoping I can use it to see what works. If nothing else, it validates my feeling of having had a bad night!
 
I think there was a feature on these this morning on BBC Breakfast News, they mentioned they had a feature coming up but I missed it as I had to go to work.

Might be worth checking on BBC iPlayer to see if its there.