The great fitness band shootout

Activity logging

The precursor to activity logging was step-logging with pedometers, and that is still the bread and butter of these fitness bands. Both the Fitbit Flex and Jawbone Up log your steps throughout the day. Nike, for whatever reason, feels the need to buck that trend and instead log “fuel” over the course of the day.

The Fuelband is purportedly able to measure activities other than walking and log them with the correct amount of fuel according to intensity. For instance, if you play some basketball or box a kangaroo, the Fuelband will be able to detect that, log your activity as more than just walking, and award you the appropriate number of fuel points.

This is an admirable approach, in a sense, because a lot of people do more than just walk for exercise. If you want to be fit, a lot of walking is only the first step on a long road. Therefore, it makes sense to encourage people to do something else other than walk.

But I found this method of activity logging useless for two reasons. The reason people use fitness bands, by and large, is to give themselves a reality check on how much activity they are really getting—and subsequently push themselves to do more. If you are already signed up for basketball games and kangaroo boxing matches, I suspect you are neither confused about nor dissatisfied with the amount of activity you get. On a scale of Snorlax to The Transporter, you are very much closer to the latter. Secondly, if you are not someone signed up for these rambunctious activities, you are more likely to engage in typical solo forms of exercise, particularly those that can be accomplished in a gym: running, cycling, using an elliptical, doing yoga or Pilates, and weight-lifting.

Running and some Pilates moves, for instance, will register on the Fuelband, but nothing else in that list will—not benching your body weight, not holding a plank position for a full five minutes, not cycling 30 miles. For all your Fuelband knows, you are ferrying potato chips between a bag and your mouth while sitting on a couch.

It seems to me that the Fuelband has cast its activity-logging lot in a way that isn’t consistent with how most people do exercise these days—in a gym, mostly not via team sports. Obviously, you know which type of exerciser you are (or want to be), and you alone determine which fitness band is right for you. But I have a hard time imagining that there is a big overlap between people interested in fitness bands and people wishing there was a way they could better abstract their intensely physical team sports schedule into a measure of “fuel.”

The Fitbit Flex and Jawbone Up also provide ways to log activities other than walking. The Fitbit Flex allows you to manually add workout sessions, categorized by activity, either in the app or through the Web interface. The Jawbone Up uses a special button press (press-press-and-hold) to begin or end a workout log, which you can then categorize by type and intensity once it’s logged in the app.

If you forget to log start and stop times through the button press, you can add or edit workouts manually in the Jawbone Up app too. The Fitbit Flex has the Jawbone Up beat on breadth of activities to log, but the Jawbone Up covers the basics like cycling, yoga, weight-lifting, tennis, and soccer.

Stepping time

While I wouldn’t expect scientific accuracy from these bands on how much activity I’m getting, I would at least expect a decent level of agreement among them. That seemed harder to come by than I would have thought.

The suggested daily goal for the Fuelband is 3,000 fuel, which seems to work out to about 10,000 steps, the same as the default goal for the Jawbone Up and Fitbit Flex. How they all logged the steps leading up to these goals, though, seems widely open to interpretation.

Just based on the trends I’ve seen, the Fuelband seems to have a tendency to under-log. There are days it’s off from the other two by thousands of steps. The Jawbone Up, if anything, overlogs, sometimes by a couple-thousand steps. The Fitbit Flex numbers tend to line up with the Jawbone Up, but these are sometimes more conservative. This makes sense given that the Jawbone Up and Fitbit Flex work in similar ways, but that also means their agreement doesn’t necessarily mean they’re right. They may just be wrong in a different way than the Fuelband.

Even so, the Fuelband’s logged activity often left me puzzled at the end of most days. Only on days that I both ran several miles and walked a lot did I seem to meet my goal. On a normal day, with a short run and some walking or a long run and little walking, I’d only get to about 2,000-2,500 fuel.

By contrast, the Fitbit Flex and Jawbone Up tend to alert me that I’ve met my goal after I’ve traversed between four and five miles, regardless of how I did it. I may just be not emphatic enough of a person for the Fuelband; perhaps my arms should swing more akimbo; maybe I should move my hands more when I talk. Either way, the device doesn't seem to understand me.

Ultimately, this seeming underestimation was more discouraging than motivating. If I run five miles in a day, my fitness band should be beside itself with joy, not trying to tiger-mom me into running five more.

That said of the Fuelband, the Fitbit Flex also seemed prone to exerting somewhat excessive pressure on me to go faster and jump higher. One day, against all odds, I traversed 25,000 steps, which is something like 12 miles. Fitbit follows this up with an e-mail that reads, “You’ve walked 25,000 steps today! How much further can you go in a day? Can you hit 5,000 more steps?”

I mean, relent a little here, Fitbit. I did just walk 12 miles. Can I have one moment in the sun without you asking for yet more steps? Can you cool your jets on the steps? The place for that kind of motivation is maybe after hitting my daily goal or reaching 15,000 steps. It's not for when my legs are about to fall off after walking 12 miles. I am a millennial. I have emotional and mental reinforcement needs. My mother only recently left my side, you know.

In terms of logging, all three fitness bands are not limited to only their own monitoring capabilities. All three have APIs available and can pull in data from other weight-loss or fitness monitoring apps.

The Fuelband interacts only with Path and Lose It, while the Jawbone Up can interact with 13 apps, including MyFitnessPal, RunKeeper, WiThings, and IFTTT. Fitbit has 30 app partnerships, including Health Month, Sleep Debt, Walgreens, and Microsoft Health Vault. There’s not much overlap among the three, and Lose It is the only app they all share. Other than that, they’re pretty distinct. If you're looking to connect the history of other weight-loss or tracking apps you use, the pages of compatible apps for each band (Fuelband, Jawbone Up, and Fitbit) are worth a look.