Category: gadgets

It was bitterly cold here the last few days, making my lunchtime walks a little more challenging. I normally walk 3 times around the large block where my office is located, which amounts to about 3 miles, or roughly 6,000 steps on my FitBit Flex. With the weather as cold as it was, I was a little concerned about how my FitBit Flex would behave if I shoved my hands in my pockets. Earlier in the spring, I discovered how pushing a stroller skews the number of steps you take. How would shoving my hands in my pockets to keep them warm affect the way the Flex counts my steps?

In the interest of science and discovery, I decided to perform an experiment yesterday. I would walk each of my 3 laps at lunch in a slightly different manner:

1. First, I’d walk the entire lap without putting my hands in my pocket.
2. Next, I’d walk the second lap with my hands in my pocket the entire time.
3. Finally, I’d walk the third lap as I always do, with a kind of hybrid mix of the first two.

I used the activity-tracking feature of the FitBit Flex to capture the data from each lap independently. When the experiment was concluded, here is how things looks:

Let me examine each lap independently.

The first lap – hands out of pockets

On the first lap, I walked with my hands out of my pockets for the entire lap. I walked just about 1,800 steps in 14 minutes. The first thing you’ll note is that this is two minutes faster than the other two laps, each of which took me 16 minutes. I think there is a very good explanation for this. With the windchill, the temperatures were below freezing. I was walking ungloved with my hands outside my pockets. It was cold and I therefore walked faster.

The second lap – hands in pockets

On the second lap, I walked with my hands in my pockets the entire lap. I walked just over 1,900 steps in 16 minutes. I have already explained why this lap was longer by 2 minutes (with my hands in my pockets, I wasn’t as cold and my pace was slower). The same walk took about 100 more steps with my hands in my pockets. 100 steps is roughly 5% of the total, which one could argue is within a margin of error of +/- 5%. But I think there are 2 other possible explanations:

1. Putting my hands in my pockets alters my stride, making it a little shorter. Over the course of 2,000 steps, this adds about 100 steps to make up the distance.
2. I didn’t walk the exact same course. Each time around is a little different, weaving this way or that to avoid obstacles, detour around people, etc.

Each of these I think easily explains an extra hundred steps. The good news, for me at least, is that the step count did not drop with my hands in my pockets, the way it does when I push a stroller.

The third lap – hybrid

The third lap is closer to how I normally walk in cold weather, shoving my hands in my pockets for a little while, and then taking them out for a little while. As you can see from the data, it is almost identical to the second lap. This tells me 2 things:

1. The first lap was an outlier, the numbers altered more because I was cold and wanted to rush through the lap.
2. The 3rd lap differed from the 2nd by only 36 steps. This tells me that whether or not my hands are in my pocket, my FitBit Flex is recording my steps the same.

Conclusions

It seems, based on my simple experiment, that walking with your hands in your pockets in cold weather does not affect how the FitBit Flex records your steps. You don’t have to worry about “losing” steps in the way you lose them when pushing a stroller. As winter approaches and cold weather becomes more common, you can rest assured knowing that the Flex is capturing your steps accurately, whether you walk with your hands in your pockets, or outside them.

I have had my FitBit Flex for something like five months now, long enough to grow comfortable with its benefits and quirks and so I thought I’d put together a list of some tips that can help people who have one (or are thinking about getting one) get the most out of it.

1. Wear it and forget it

Perhaps the best thing about the FitBit Flex is that you wear it on your wrist. No need to clip it onto your clothing the way you had to with a FitBit Ultra, for instance. And since the FitBit Flex is waterproof, you can shower with it, meaning there is little need to take it off. This means you can wear it and forget it. You won’t find that you’ve left the house for the day only to leave your activity tracker on the dresser.

2. But set a recurring reminder to charge it

That said, I have found that I need to charge my FitBit Flex every 5-6 days. The battery has only run completely down once. The way I avoid the battery running completely down is by proactively reminding myself to charge the battery.

I use the reminder feature in Google Calendar and have created a recurring reminder to send a text message to my phone every 5 days, reminding me to charge my Flex.

When I get the reminder, I typically charge the Flex in the evening when I am doing my writing and getting the kids ready for bed. It doesn’t take more than 2 hours or so to get a full charge and by the time I go to bed, the device is once again fully charged.

3. Track specific activities

You can (with the latest firmware update) track individual activities with your Flex, which is useful if you want to know some detail about that activity. You do this by putting your Flex into Activity/Sleep mode (tapping it rapidly until you get the two flashing lights). When your activity is finished, you tap it rapidly again until you see 5 blinking lights.

What this does is sets a “start” and “end” marker. Your FitBit is constantly recording your activity and these markers allow you to look at a specific section of that activity to see the details. When you log into the FitBit dashboard, you will see those activities listed in the day on which you captured them. I’ve used this to capture the distance of my walk from my house to my office, for instance. Or how long a particular hike took. Here is what an activity record looks like for my lunchtime walk, as seen from the FitBit website dashboard:

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