Steps keep adding up when I move my arm

[MarkMM]

I noticed that activity and steps keep adding up if I'm moving my fitbit arm around while driving. Is this cheating? Seems to keep the heart rate in the active zone, so maybe it's legit activity?

Moderator edit: subject updated for clarity 

[bbarrera · Accepted solution]

Cheating at what? Maybe a better way to look at it is perhaps you are fooling yourself about health benefits? 

[MarkMM]

This is kind of buggy software. I tried to uncheck accept solution and it posted as accepted. 

Hi bbarrera, no, actually I was plenty active before I even bought the blaze. Even more so now. 🙂  What I'm saying is, say I want 200 active minutes a day. 15,000 steps a day. I was moving my arm around while running an errand the other day and got credit. It also showed my heart rate around 100 bpm while driving. Enough to count for activity. People who are disabled are encouraged to move their arms for exercise. I think it was a legit question. 🙂 Moving my arm while driving made my goals easier that day.

[Rich_Laue]

I can't really say the firmware on the tracker is buggy, the tracker is mounted on the arm. Therefore it looks for arm motions that a e what it expects to see while the feet are walking. It also looks for a slight up/down motion as if the watch is in the pocket. While it does have fairly good algorithms it can be fooled by moving the arm up and down more than 4 times. It doesn't acknowledge that steps are being taken unless it sees 5 between pauses. 

So I can agree, unless your intentionally moving your arm to gain steps, your only cheating yourself. 

[bbarrera]

@MarkMM I was trying to be funny and accidentally hit post button before editing and adding emoji. 

Thanks for adding some commentary, and I understand your concern now. When Fitbit gets it wrong it can take some fiddling around to accurately track activities that you consider to be active minutes.

Personally I only want to track planned activities - cycling, swimming, and weight lifting - the first two are cardio endurance activities but not step based so eventually I found better ways (outside Fitbit world) of tracking and planning workouts.

For example this week I averaged over 100 minutes per day Sunday-Thursday on cycling - really tough, heart pounding, sweaty workouts. And averaged about 8,000 steps per day. Yesterday and today were planned recovery days, but my wife and I did a lot of shopping today (Saturday) so I open Fitbit app right now after 11pm and get confetti for 10,000 steps. As if I really care about steps LOL. 

The moral of the story - decide what is important to you and ignore the other stuff. If Fitbit active minutes aren't accurately tracking your workouts then find another metric to track and focus on that.

Hope that helps.