I have had my FitBit Charge HR for a month now and am ready to write my review!
There are several different FitBits available. I purchased the Charge HR. What that means is that it tracks steps, sleep, miles, calories, and my heart rate. The heart rate monitor was essential for me… I can track calories burned during exercise more accurately.
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| FitBit Charge HR review |
Here’s a look at the home screen…
It tracks and trends your steps for the week. I love getting the 10,000 steps! However, it doesn’t happen every week like it did on this one.
It also tracks floors climbed. As you can see, I don’t climb a ton of floors. I live in a single story house.
It tracks your exercise too… You can do biking, walking, running. Here I did my PiYo and walking. If you use it while on the treadmill, it will NOT count your steps *unless* you have your arm swinging down at your side. If you arm is not moving the FitBit assumes you aren’t either.
What’s cool with the charge HR model is that it lets you track your sleep. It shows you how many times you were restless and how many times you woke up. As you can see, I like to sleep at lot and sleep pretty solidly through the night.
It also tracks your sleeping pattern over time. In the screenshot below, I was working various shifts during various times of day. As you can see, it totally messed up my sleep. I mean one night (which is actually when I slept during broad daylight) I only slept 3 hours. People who work night shift and swing shifts have chronic sleep deprivation… You can see that evidenced below.
… then I went on vacation. And had a normal circadian rhythm like the rest of the world. Check out how I consistently slept the nearly the same duration every night!
Here is a sample of a work out I did on July 4th. I went bike riding this day. You can see how my work-out truly went. It measures your heart rate during your work out! It calculates your target HR based on height, weight, and age.
It also takes resting heart rates when you sleep.
If you have friends or family with a fit bit, you can add them as a friend and challenge them! It’s kind of fun (if you’re winning!)
It can also do calorie tracking with food that you enter manually into the system. I haven’t done that (yet).
I sync mine with my iPad and iPhone without any problems. I find the battery lasts about 4-5 days.
PROS
– It helps me exercise. I like getting 10,000 steps!
– It allows me to better calculate my burned calories while exercising.
– It lets me know how I am sleeping which helps me with my night shift planning
– did I mention it motivates you to exercise? I think that’s really the biggest plus and is worth mentioning again.
– It lets me measure how far I walked!
– You can sync it up to other apps and map your runs
– the battery life is long and can be easily recharged
CONS
– it did cause a rash on me one day. To avoid this, I recommend taking it off right away after exercising and cleaning it regularly.
– if you do swimming for exercise, it doesn’t count it
– it’s not 100% accurate. My mom’s fitbit and my fitbit will measure different steps for the same distance, which is expected that there will be some variation but it shouldn’t be a large difference.
At first I thought the fitbit looked really ugly and I would never wear it… but now that I’ve been wearing it around I barely notice it on my arm! I got it in the black because I thought that would be the least annoying of all the colors. The color selection is below…
There is a wide range of FitBit products. The fitbit flex is the most popular and allows you to change arm bands with Tory Burch accessories! But for me, the heart rate monitor was necessary and was only available on the two fitbits on the bottom right of the picture below. FitBit also makes a scale that syncs with their program. Here is a comparison of all the different models! I considered other tracking devices but thought this one delivered the most bang for the buck!
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