After purchasing a new Pixel Watch, Google offers six months of Fitbit Premium. If you pre-ordered a Google Pixel Watch 3, you might want to know what Fitbit Premium offers before paying a monthly or yearly subscription after the trial. Is Fitbit Premium worth it, or is it better to cancel the subscription? Our guide dives into the exclusive features you can access with a Fitbit subscription.
What is Fitbit Premium?
Fitbit Premium brings additional features that unlock the full Fitness app for your smartwatch, fitness tracker, or smartphone. You can access the Fitness app for free but with limitations. The free version shows scores for sleep and stress, but it doesn’t break down how scores are calculated. Nor do you have access to coaching, personal workouts, guided meditations, and detailed reports behind these scores.
Google introduced a paywall to access these features. You can download the app for free. However, you won’t get far without a subscription. Fitbit’s advantage over dedicated paid apps is that it provides an all-in-one holistic health view of your fitness. It also includes coaching and guidance videos for physical and mental health and tutorials for adding nutrition to your meals. Fitbit partnered with popular brands, like Eat Well and Calm, to build its extensive content library.
How to sign up for Fitbit Premium
You can buy Fitbit Premium in the Fitbit app or activate it when you set up the device. You can also receive a Fitbit Premium subscription with Google One in select locations. Purchasing a new Google device may include a free trial for Fitbit Premium, or a new Fitbit account may receive the same offer after signing in to the app for the first time. If you are on Fitbit Premium and have access to a free trial, cancel your current subscription to start the offered trial.
Fitbit Premium features and benefits
You can access core Fitbit features by using the Fitbit app and creating an account. With Fitbit Premium, you can gain access to the following features that you don’t get with the free version:
- Sleep score breakdown and monthly sleep profile
- Wellness report
- Video and audio workouts from popular brands
- Guided meditations
- Stress Management score and details
- Recipe and meal hacks
- Safety Signal (only available on 4G LTE watch)
The Daily Readiness score was a previous Fitbit Premium feature guided by
machine learning
. It won’t be included as a premium feature after the Pixel 3 launches in September. Instead, you’ll access this Fitbit feature for free as part of the base version, starting with the Pixel Watch 3 on September 10, 2024.
Sleep score breakdown and monthly sleep profile
You can acquire a sleep score on the free version of Fitbit and a small breakdown of your time in each sleep cycle. Fitbit Premium analyzes your sleep by checking duration, heart rate, and restlessness to learn more about your sleep. You can access this data in the app.
To ensure you unlock the monthly sleep profile, bring your device and wear your watch to bed every night for 30 days. After unlocking the monthly sleep profile, Fitbit Premium provides a detailed analysis of your sleeping habits, personalized insights on improving your patterns, and the optimal time to wake up. Alongside the analysis, Fitbit Premium offers a sleep animal that matches your sleeping habits.
Wellness report
With Fitbit Premium, you can download a wellness report by visiting the Today tab within the app. The report includes your activity, sleep, heart rate, and weight data for the last 12 months. You can export your wellness report from the Fitbit app. In addition to the wellness report, you can receive Fitness Premium insights. Fitness Premium insights take your recorded health and fitness data and turn them into usable personable tips and observations.
Video and audio workouts from popular brands
Fitbit Premium unlocks access to hundreds of workouts from popular brands. Fitbit partnered with brands like Hyperice, Stride Fitness, and Tone it Up (great for pre-natal and post-natal workouts). You can select workouts by brand or browse a fitness instructor’s catalog. You can also bookmark a workout and view it later.
Guided meditations
Guided meditations are available in the Coach section of the Fitbit app. In addition to workout brands, Fitbit partnered with brands focusing on mindfulness and rest exercises, such as Calm, Aaptiv, Breethe, and Aura. You can browse all the brands under the Brands category in Coach. You can add these videos to your favorites. Tapping the favorites section at the top of the Coach page displays your saved bookmarks.
Stress Management score and details
Fitbit Premium offers three scores in each area for stress: responsiveness (score out of 30), exertion balance (score out of 40), and sleep patterns (score out of 30). It takes each score and calculates the total out of 100. The higher the score, the better equipped your body is for handling stress.
Recipe and meal hacks
Fitbit Premium offers exclusive snack, breakfast, lunch, and dinner tutorials. The app has a library of videos from Eating Well that you can access through the Recipes filter on the Coach page. These videos offer tutorials on how to make these meals, but they don’t display the exact recipes. You can consult the published meals on the Eating Well website for free to find associated recipes.
Safety Signal
You can access Google safety features with Fitbit Premium using an LTE connection. When you don’t have your phone and don’t have a carrier plan on your watch, use the Safety Signal connectivity feature during an emergency. According to Google, the watch can access safety features, including calls to and from emergency contacts, Safety Check, Emergency Sharing, Emergency SOS, and Fall Detection.
You must purchase the LTE version of the watch, but it can’t be a new Pixel Watch 2 purchased at AT&T or Verizon. Safety Signal only works in the US, Canada, the UK, and Germany.
You
can’t access Safety Signal
if you have a carrier plan on your watch. Most carrier plans grant access to emergency calls while away from a phone.
Upcoming Fitbit Premium features
On August 13, 2024, Fitbit announced new Premium-only features, which will be available in September 2024. You’ll have access to Workout Recommendations and Peloton classes led by Peloton instructors for yoga, strength, running, and cycling. For the Pixel Watch 3, run recommendations are made daily, powered by Google AI, based on your goals, previous running history, readiness score, and target cardio load.
Which devices are compatible with Fitbit Premium?
Google makes the Fitbit app available on most smartphone and watch devices. You can install the Fitbit app if it meets one of the conditions:
- Apple iOS 15 and higher
- Android 10 or higher
- Huawei P8 Lite
- Huawei P9 Lite
- Xiaomi Mi 6
- Huawei P20 Lite
Connecting various devices to your Fitbit account is possible, but there are limitations. For example, you cannot add multiple devices that use the Fitbit App Gallery to the same account. Fitbit doesn’t have a premium plan for family sharing.
Is Fitbit Premium worth it?
You get a comprehensive fitness package in one app for $10 a month (or $80 per year). But there are other options to consider. For example, the popular Premium-only feature Daily Readiness will eventually become free to all users. The Daily Readiness score provides general insight into activity, sleep, and heart rate variability. Learning that information is enough for some, so Fitbit Premium might not be worth the cost unless you’re into fitness classes, which primarily can only be accessed with a subscription.
Take advantage of your free trial
Other apps leverage cheaper alternatives for fitness tracking or a deeper understanding of sleep analysis and coaching, such as apps built for sleep tracking, like Sleep as Android. Purchasing Fitbit Premium might not be helpful if you use other apps. But if you buy a new fitness device from Google, you can dive into the six-month trial and decide if the features are worth it. There’s a restrictive window for activation. You must activate the Premium membership trial within 60 days of activating your device.
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