Exercise Shortcuts not in Exercise app

[CatherineShe]

It seems I can only start a workout that is a walk, run, or hike and that these are the only exercises the Charge 3 will automatically recognize. I changed My exercise Shortcuts to reflect my main forms of exercise (spin, weights and interval training mainly), but those are not reflected in the "auto-recognize exercises" in the exercise tab of the dashboard and I can't change those. I thought it would just stays to record a workout when my heart rate went up, but I just did an hour of weight training and it recorded nothing. Help!

[JohnnyRow]

Hi @CatherineShe.  Welcome to the Fitbit forums.

There are 3 different ways of recording exercise sessions, and I think you might be getting them confused.

1.  If you start from the exercise tile of your phone's app, yes there are just 3 choices: walk, run, hike.  I suspect these are intended mainly for the older, low-end trackers that do not have any buttons on them to start workouts from them.  This is also the only way to get verbal cues on your walks and runs as the tracker has no speaker.

2.  Auto-recognized exercise (some places referred to as SmartTrack).  This is when your tracker recognizes what you are doing and records it automatically without no special effort from you.  To see these activities, tap on the 'days of exercise' tile on your phone, then on the gear icon near top right.  That show the activities that presumably can be auto-recognized. This list is set - you cannot add to it as it depends on what movements the tracker hopefully can recognize  and translate into which activity.  With each is a time, which is the minimum length of it required for it to count s an exercise session.  You can modify this minimum time for each, or set any to never be auto-recognized.  For instance if it says 15+ minutes for Walk, that means any walk of less than 15 minutes will not automatically be recorded as an exercise session.

3.  The Exercise app on your tracker, which I recommend as the best choice. You get to this by swiping left on the Charge 3 clock screen to get to Exercise, then tap that, and continue.  When you tap on the Exercise app, then swipe left and right, these are the 'exercise shortcuts', probably where you set spin, weights, etc.

I prefer this, manually starting and stopping workout from the tracker, over the auto-recognition capability because you have complete control over saying when workout starts and ends, and you can categorize it however you want, rather than relying on Fitbit to correctly figure out what you are doing.

These are more fully explained is this help section:

How do I track my workouts with my Fitbit device?

Also note that even when an activity does not get recorded as an exercise session, you still get credit in daily totals for all steps, calories, etc during that time.