How to turn off Fitbit’s heart rate and active zone minute notifications, alerts, and vibrations

Love working out with your Fitbit but constantly getting vibrations, buzzes, and notifications about your heart rate zone and active zone minutes?

If your walks, runs, and other exercise app activities are annoyingly interrupted, learn how to turn them off!

Related reading

• Forget 10,000 steps a day! How to use Fitbit active zone minutes and why they matter
• How to set high and low heart rate notifications on your Fitbit
• How to remove unwanted notifications on your Fitbit

Types of active zone minutes and heart zone notifications on Fitbit

Only newer Fitbits support active zone minutes and identify your heart rate zone while exercising. Active Zone Minutes show you the time your heart spent in the fat burn, cardio, or peak heart-rate zones when exercising or engaging in rigorous activity.

Your Fitbit alerts you via vibrations and/or notifications when you hit a new zone. The number of times your device vibrates (buzzes) indicates which zone you’re in.

Usually, one vibration indicates the fat zone, two indicates cardio, and three is for your peak zone.

However, it’s slightly different on the Sense and Versa 3, with 1 telling you are below the fat zone, 2 for the fat zone, 3 for cardio, and 4 buzzes for the peak zone.

Fitbits that track Active Zone Minutes include Charge 4 and above, Inspire 2 and above, Luxe, Sense Series, and Versa Series. All other Fitbits track active minutes.

One easy way to identify Fitbit active zone minutes vs. active minutes is the icon in the Fitbit app. The active zone minutes icon is a chevron, while active minutes is a lightning bolt.

An important distinction is that heart zone notifications differ from low and high heart rate notifications. 

• Heart zone alerts and active minute notifications are delivered when you are active and engaged in exercise or activity.
• Low and high heart rate notifications are delivered when you appear inactive (at rest) for at least 10 minutes.

Turning heart zone notifications off does not impact getting low and high heart rate alerts!

Turn off Fitbit’s active minutes and heart zone notifications

If you own a supported model, your Fitbit may show you one or all of these types of notifications:

1. Heart-zone notifications and vibrations while exercising using the Exercise app.
2. Weekly Active Zone Minutes Notifications.
3. Heart-zone notifications during everyday activity.

You change these settings on the Fitbit device, not via the Fitbit app.

How to turn off your Fitbit’s Heart Zone notifications in the Exercise app

1. On your Fitbit, open the Exercise app.
2. Choose an exercise.
3. Swipe up to see more options within that exercise.
4. Look for and turn off Heart Rate Zone Notifications, Heart Zone Notifications, Zone Notifications, Active Zone Minutes, or AZM Notifications.
   1. Repeat for any other exercises where you don’t want these notifications when entering target heart rate zones (fat, cardio, peak) while working out.

For Versa, Versa 2, Versa Lite, and Inspire 2. Tap the Settings gear icon and choose to set Zone Notifications or Active Zone Minutes off. 

How to turn off your Fitbit’s Weekly Active Zone Minutes notifications and everyday activity notifications

1. On your Fitbit, open its Settings app (gear icon on some devices.)
   1. For Fitbit Sense Series and Versa 3+, choose Goal reminders.
2. Tap Heart Zone notifications, Zone Notifications, Active Zone Minutes goal, or Active Zone Minutes Notification.
3. Turn or toggle the setting off.

Don’t see these options?

If you don’t see a way to turn off these alerts, you may run an older FitbitOS version.

Open your Fitbit’s Settings, swipe down to the bottom, and look for an option to toggle Active Zone alerts on and off.

Are you looking to turn off reminders to move and hourly notifications on your Fitbit?

1. Open the Fitbit app and choose the Devices icon in the top left.
2. Under Connected to Fitbit, choose your Fitbit model.
3. Scroll down and tap Reminders to Move.
4. Turn Reminders to Move off.

Summary

If those notifications and buzzes about your heart zones and active minutes annoy and disrupt you, it’s relatively easy to turn them off. 

Once off, you should no longer see those heart-zone and active minute notifications on your Fitbit.