Three Months With a Fitness Tracker

In March, I bought an entry-level fitness tracker ("Garmin Vivofit 3") for 50 €. Being interested only in my daily step count and the distance/steps covered on various routine routes, I did not use any of the advanced features like sleep tracking or anything else that required interaction with the Garmin cloud. Initializing the tracker required the creation of an account with my birthday (Jan 1st + accurate year 😉), height and mass.

Originally this blog post should have been called "One Month With a Fitness Tracker". In fact I was barely using the tracker after the first month. So here are the results:

• The tracker's measurement of distance was surprisingly accurate (to 10 meters, over the course of multiple 5 kilometer tracks), the step count/length was consistent between samples
• As an office worker, going to the water dispenser or toilet is not enough to get rid of the sedentary warning bar (for me around 400 steps seem to be required to get rid of the full bar)
• Even on good (as in active) working days, I do not manage to cover 10000 steps (then the step count is within the 8000-9000 range)
• Going to lunch outside the office adds at most 2000 steps
• Doing 10000 steps a day is equivalent to a 1.5 hour walk a day for me

Due to the consistency of the measurements and me now knowing my metrics, I am mostly using the tracker as a watch now. In fact, I only need to know how much time I spent covering a distance to deduct the steps and kilometers done.