ksryder

I got a Wahoo Kickr a couple years ago and its my first experience training with power numbers. Calories based off power meter numbers are still an estimate, but about as close of an estimate as you can get outside of a lab. Anyway, point being that I can expect to burn about 600-650 calories an hour with a good solid effort. To burn 700 or more calories is an extremely hard workout.

So now I have a pretty good idea of what those efforts feel like, which means that the estimates I get from Strava or my Wahoo out on the road (where I don't have a power meter) are always way, way too high.

Granted, this is still all guesswork, but at least now that I have some sort of idea of what 700 calories/hour feels like, I know that the relaxed coffee ride I did with friends did not actually burn 800 calories per hour.

So for my own calorie-tracking purposes, in my head I just automatically adjust every outdoor ride to roughly 600 calories/hour.

Anyway, so I've had a Fitbit for a few months. I don't wear it when I'm riding but I have it synced to Strava, so my rides eventually show up in my activities.

If I talk a 30-minute walk, I think Fitbit comically exaggerates the amount of calories I've burned. There is absolutely no way I'm burning 350 calories in a 20-30 minute walk.

However, when a bike ride syncs from Strava, Fitbit disregards Strava's calorie estimates and uses its own calculations. Based on my own 600-650 calories/hour estimate, Fitbit's estimates are very close to that every time.

So in conclusion: Fitbit: bad at auto-detecting activities and estimating calories for walks, but good at estimating calories for bikes.