Exercise days not counting

[nunya.b]

The app sometimes does not register a day as an exercise day, even when I hit my active minutes goal. As you can see in the below screenshot, last week Saturday was not counted as an exercise day even though it should have. I haven't noticed a pattern for which days don't get counted; it seems random.

I'm running the latest version of the Android app, but this has been happening for months.

 

[Gr4ndp4]

Hi, @nunya.b welcome, may I suggest you check your app is up to date? Sync your app (by swiping down & releasing the today screen) Go into your phone settings>Fitbit app>in storage & cache clear the cache>delete the Fitbit app>restart your phone>reload the Fitbit app from the Play Store and log in again. I hope this helps, let us know how you get on.

Cheers

[nunya.b]

Hello,
As I said in my original post, my app is up to date.

[RiekoC]

Hello @nunya.b 

On the days that the app isn't showing an exercise day, did you manually start an activity or did an activity that your device auto-tracked (walk, run, bike, etc.)?

Even though you met your AZM goal, that doesn't mean your Fitbit will automatically track that day as an exercise day. I have plenty of days where I meet or exceed my daily AZM and step goals, but since I didn't specifically do an exercise session, those days aren't tracked as exercise completed.

You might be interested in this help article which explains What are Active Zone Minutes (<-- click link)

[nunya.b]

Thank you for the article, but that is not the solution to my issue. I have
a basic Inspire, which does not track heartbeat and therefore does not do
active zone minutes. I have the basic active minutes tracking, where
hitting my active minutes goal means I get an exercise day.

Again, there is no pattern for the days that do not get logged. Some days I
exceed my active minutes target in one go, some days it's broken up into
smaller chunks. Some days have a higher active minute count than those that
do get logged as exercise days. I also rarely manually log exercise
sessions; I tend to rely on the automatic exercise recognition. Virtually
all of my logged exercise days are based on active minutes.

As a side note, I can't find a single article in the help center explaining
exercise days. If they truly rely on manually logged exercise sessions, I
would appreciate the documentation on that.

Thanks!

[Gr4ndp4]

Hi, @nunya.b can you tell us which "Inspire" device you have and how long you have had it? While my experience is not particularly extensive the Inspire devices I have all track HR. If you go into the settings on your device and find HR ensure it is turned on, further, look for a setting that allows you to choose between on wrist or on clip - to get HR it needs to be on the wrist and the LED on the back should be flashing. My advice to reload the app is to deal with the possibility that the Fitbit app you have, while up to date, may have been have been corrupted while loading.

Let us know by posting here again.

Cheers

[nunya.b]

Hi @Gr4ndp4, I appreciate your suggestions. I have the most basic Inspire, and I've had it for a few years now. It does not do heart rate monitoring, and there is no LED on the back. Here is a screenshot of my device settings from the app. As you can see there is no option to turn on heart rate:

I have followed all the suggested steps, including clearing the cache and uninstalling and reinstalling the app, multiple times. This is not a recent issue. I've noticed it happening for months now, on and off. Additionally, if you search "exercise day count" on this forum, you can find similar posts going back to 2019. I also saw a recent post about incorrect exercise day counts from someone with the iOS app.

Either the company needs to clarify how exercise days are (or are not) logged, or this is a bug that they've been ignoring for years. It's not the biggest issue, but it is a fault in the product's functionality. As advertised, automatically recognized activity should translate to exercise days. Evidently it does not.

I also want to head off any suggestions that the problem is with my Inspire - it's not. It consistently performs as well as the day I got it and recognizes all the activity it should recognize. This is an issue with the app calculating exercise days.

[Gr4ndp4]

Hi, @nunya.b, The settings I mentioned should be on your device, not the app. It looks like your "Inspire" is the earliest of the Inspire series, I'm not familiar with it. I will message more experienced community members to see if anyone can offer advice.

Cheers

[LZeeW · Accepted solution]

@nunya.b   I hope I can give you some insight, since I have over 10 years of Fitbit experience, from the most basic to the most advanced models.  I hope this doesn't sound too basic.

• You must have a tracked/logged exercise to get an exercise day.  Your Inspire has SmartTrack, the auto-recognition feature.  It automatically tracks seven different active types of workouts.  The default minimum time is 15 minutes, but you can decrease it to 10 minutes.  A SmartTrack walk, run etc., will count as an Exercise day.  You can also log many types of activities by using the app.  You tap on the green "+" button, then Manually log Activity, then fill in the rest.  If you log Yoga this way, you will get an Exercise day, but probably no active minutes.  It's not that kind of exercise.  You must do one of these two things to get an Exercise day. 
• Active minutes, in and of themselves, won't count as exercise.  If you have your SmartTrack walk threshold set to 15 minutes, but only walk for 12, you'll get your 12 active minutes, but it won't count as an exercise.

Does this help?  A moderator moved your post to the Android app forum, because you mentioned Android in your post.  There is nothing wrong with your app or your Inspire.

[nunya.b]

Hi @LZeeW, I do appreciate you jumping in on this, and it's a good explanation. But these are all things I understood before. As you can see in the screenshot of my original post, I had a session of 21 consecutive active minutes, thus hitting and exceeding the 15-minute threshold I had set. However, despite this, the app did not count this as an exercise day. That's the issue I'm having.

Maybe there's something I'm genuinely misunderstanding, but from my perspective there are random days where I hit all the criteria for an exercise day (e.g. at least one continuous session of active minutes hitting or exceeding the active minutes goal), but the exercise day does not get counted/an exercise does not get logged. It seems that until I can demonstrate some kind of pattern in the skipped days, this won't be seen as a bug. I appreciate everyone assisting on this, and I guess I'll just make a new post if it becomes a consistent problem. For now it's more of a minor annoyance.

[LZeeW]

@nunya.b   Your dashboard shows your total, but you might not have gotten them all at once.  Please tap on your active minute icon and you should see a page that shows when you got these active minutes, by hour.  Active zone minute devices do this.  Also, SmartTrack looks at the accelerometer patterns to recognize exercise.  It can only recognize certain activities.  I wore a Charge 2 for several years, an active minute Fitbit.  My gardening was very hit or miss.  Sometimes I would get Aerobic Workout, sometimes nothing, despite enough active minutes.  SmartTrack need to see a pattern it can categorize.