Fitbit Inspire 2 Health & Fitness Tracker

Great fitness tracker with a lot of health insights. For me it was important to have a sleep tracker and a silent alarm.

It comes with extra features like phone notifications, step counter, and so on….

I got this watch to help monitor and control my POTS, and honestly I really enjoy it. I love using all the features.

HEARTRATE- I used both a oximeter and blood pressure monitor to compare heart rates. It was held very well accuracy. Workouts display your highest heart rate and average including a map of your different heart rates. It measures your resting heart rate, your heart rate variability, heart rate throughout the day, and etc.

Health metrics- I found this part of the app interesting, breathing rate, heart rate variablity, skin temperature, and resting heart rate is here. I like seeing the different trends and taking note of how my health impacts them. I came down with a runny nose one day and it went away the next (assuming my body fought off whatever it was) and i noticed a major increase in overall body tempt, a drop in breathing rate, and a drop in heart rate variability.

Stress management – each day a score is given based on these factors responsiveness, exertion balance, and sleep patterns, you then log how you feel that day. This can help you notice how stress impacts your body and performance.

Mindfulness- I enjoy the breathing with the watch features, the watch has you inhale then vibrates as you exhale. The app comes with a bunch of videos for mindfulness.

readiness score- This score is based on your heart rate variability, activity level, and sleep. It gives you a score based on what you should focus on, ex a 1 score after a high intense exercise day tells you to take the day and focus on recovery while a higher score let’s me know my body is ready for a nice exercise. I don’t always follow this score since I am a dancer and I have practices anyways haha.

Exercise- one flaw
I believe if you are a healthy person you shouldn’t have any problems, but I don’t believe these calories. I heard that fitbit uses your heart rate, and when my heart rate due to POTS is very high; it says I burn a huge amount of calories everyday. Of course i don’t know the way POTS impacts calorie burning, but I do not believe it is accurate due to my condition, I am sure it is fine for others. That being said I enjoy every other feature it automatically logs workout if detected with the time, avg heart rate, calories, and zone minutes. It displays a chart of your heart rate with the highest and the amount of time you spent in each heart zone.

Sleep profile- this has kept me in line would making sure I get sleep, I have found it to be pretty accurate and I love seeing how well I slept / when I need to get it together. Gives you a score based on time asleep, deep and REM, and restoration. Displays your sleep in the different cycles.

Weight, period, food, and water
I don’t use these features much. The period assumes your fertile window is a specific amount of days after your period but that’s not entirely true, please research it if you are wanting some type of family planning birth control. Weight I log sometimes but it’s nice to have everything in its spot. The rest are nice features that you can use I just don’t feel a need for.

STEPS- I found these to be really accurate.

SKIN REACTION
I got contact dermitis which doesn’t hurt or anything I believe twice. What would happen was I had it pretty tight around my wrist and on top of that throughout the day from washing hands or dishes would get soap or water stuck between it. Do i think this is the material fault or the watch? no I also don’t think it should deter anyone from buying it. Just make sure to clean your watch, make sure water and soap doesn’t get on your wrist/ under the watch, and don’t wear it too tight. If it ever happens to you, just switch your wrist while it heals and take note what the problem was.

Notifications/ alarms/ Tile/ etc
I used the timer/alarm sections are backup. No sound is played it just vibrates. Tile is a nice app you can set up to find your watch. I don’t tend to use the notifications but you can see your notifications and texts that come on your phone from your watch. And i am probably forgetting a few things but I think I covered a large portion.

OVERALL- In the beginning I had to get used to using the watch but once I adjusted it was really easy. I think for the price the watch is a great health watch and I would definitely recommend it!

I bought my Inspire 2 a couple months ago, and I just love it!

What I use it for is as a heart rate monitor and to track my sleep. It has a really long battery life – I recharge it about every 10 days (it sends me an email to remind me when it needs charging). It is also really lightweight.

My normal forms of exercise are: weights, treadmill, walks (our neighborhood is quite hilly), and yoga. My fitbit does really well at tracking my heart rate on walks – and it leverages my phone’s GPS for distance. It sometimes does well at tracking intensity on the treadmill, and sometimes not. How tightly you wear the watchband affects if it misses beats. An amusing aspect of the heart rate monitor is – that something about going shopping at Costco with my wife sometimes causes my heart rate to go up quite a bit. I think it is we naturally shop at different speeds. I try to fob the increase in heart rate off as the romance of shopping together, but my wife is not buying it… The fitbit will report those bouts of high heart rate as exercise. Normally, though, the heart rate is pretty accurate – I was in the hospital for a little while – and one of the things I liked to do was compare my fitbit’s heart rate measure – with that of the hospital’s heart rate monitor. In general they were within 1 beat of each other. I use the Active Zone Minutes feature of fitbit to help me track my 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week. Active Zone Minutes can be more or less accurate, so I don’t follow them religiously, but more as a motivator to do more.

As a sleep tracker my fitbit is also very useful. I am trying to get more sleep — and having an objective source of data gives me feedback on how I am doing . I have noticed though, if you sit really still for a long period of time, such as in an emergency room, it interprets that as sleep. I suppose sitting quietly is a form of rest, so I don’t feel too bad about that.

I find my fitbit very motivating — it causes me to do more exercise than I would have otherwise. I think the mind set that it promotes is very helpful. It makes a great watch. For the most part it is unobtrusive. If you already have a smart-phone, and want to improve your health, the Inspire 2 is reasonably priced for what it gives. So far I have not used the Premium features that much – so I don’t have an opinion on that at this point.

Cronometer (a nutrition tracking app – that can also be used to track biometrics) can be linked to my fitbit, and automatically grab some metrics – I find that very useful too. Fitbit is mostly focused on exercise – I find it easier to use Cronometer to track food, blood pressure, blood glucose, weight etc…

I did also try the fitbit smart scale but it did not work well for me, so I manually enter weight data into my fitbit app.

The Inspire 2 is definitely a keeper and, for me, well worth the money.