5d ago

How do you get continuity in your fitness tracking across devices and services?

This is an open ended question. How do you create continuity in how you visualize your fitness journey across devices/platforms?

For example, I have data from my Amazfit, Zepp, Google Fitness days, I currently use a Garmin 530 while cycling and a Fenix 6 Pro Solar for everything else. With Garmin+ hinting at bad things to come and the high prices of Garmin watches I'm considering a possible Polar or a Suunto next. How do you visualize your trends over time?

do you feed your stats into a spreadsheet?
Do you use a quantified self app like Exist that pulls data from multiple sources

Another concern of mine is winding up split between ecosystems like if I bought a Suunto watch and eventually replaced my Garmin Edge 530 with a Wahoo device.

I can't pretend that Garmin does this especially well, even when my current devices are all Garmin, but I know my watch measures recovery and readiness after the rides I do on my edge, so I'm never in the dark as to where I stand on my recovery. Using a device only for workouts seems like it would be problematic as fitness isn't just movement, but also how you eat, sleep, etc.

5 comments

This is one of the pain points of fitness tracking. There is nothing that supports everything because companies try their best to lock everything down for their own subscription fees and data sale profits outside of the basics that you can go through their servers for.
Plus hyper-specific requirements per person make it difficult.
Honestly probably some app that grabs data from every service you use would be best.
Also good to note that that garmin's "recovery time" is just a random thumb in the air educated guess specifically from hard workout to hard workout, not from workout to workout, and it is not a "rest period" but a period of "less than 'intense' workouts" and they have not allowed anyone to see their algorithm or do studies correlating its accuracy. That means it is not accurate.
- Very true. The recovery info from my watch is always secondary to how I feel. Often this aligns well, but sometimes it does not.

Good questions, I'm all in on Garmin for tracking my life by doing everything with my watch, but I too am quite upset with Garmin+ and will have a hard time buying the next Gen watch from them. Garmin is cash grabbing all over. They doubled the Navionics app subscription last year too.
I've been with them since 2013 with watches and am not looking forward to the idea of changing to another ecosystem. Introducing a + subscription has really soured me.
5 years ago I'd probably have recommended Strava but they paywalled me away.
- I'm also untangling myself from Strava. I already got a few good suggestions to replace the features I will miss most, like the personal heatmaps. There's something super motivating about watching my ride footprint expand to cover large sections of my city as my fitness grows and I get more and more rides under my belt. I also like the fitness and freshness chart they do. I have a few years of summer peaks and winter lows that provide a nice backdrop to the current year's training.
  The last straw for me was how close they've become to google. If I'm paying to use a platform, especially if I'm paying a decent sized chunk of change, I don't want them to also sell my data.
  
  The new normal (double dipping / selling your data). I wasn't massively invested in Strava so I just left/deleted my account. Added more connections to Garmin and use the feed for social interaction (which I don't do a ton)