Originally Posted by
bigbiker1
Thanks for the advice! I should rest tomorrow completely or just do a shorter ride?
Also I am curious why you say that about the cals burned on my ride? I use a fitbit surge that also tracks heart rate, I have always been told as long as the tracker has your weight and uses heart rate tracking it should be very accurate.
Listen to your body ... and be skeptical at this point. You're new to riding, you're still building base miles. You may feel great, but you may be fatigued and not know it. I'm still building too, so my current ride schedule is Monday Tuesday, rest day Wednesday, Thursday Friday, and then I'm still working on making time on the weekends to ride. I HATE not riding on Wednesdays, but on Thursday I can pretty much count on an awesome ride because I'm rested.
As for the accuracy of a fitness tracker ... in particular when it comes to calories burned, they're notoriously inaccurate.
I wear a Heart Rate strap when I ride, connected to the Polar Beat app. So this morning I rode just under 13 miles, in 57 minutes, roughly a 13.1 mph average.According to the Beat app, I burned 631 calories. That number surely isn't 100 percent correct, but knowing what I know about my body, my past success using the HRM to gauge calories burned, I'm comfortable with the number enough to trust it. To be on the safe side, and to ensure your continued weight loss, I'd take any sort of "burn" number your tracker is giving you and cut it in half.
A fitness tracker is great for tracking steps and ancillary burn ... but when it comes to tracking activities like cycling, not the best. I have a Polar Loop tracker and every time I rode it registered my ride as steps ... I'd end up with like 16K steps for the day, which is in no way correct. I've since stopped riding with it on and went back to me trusty HRM.