Active Minutes changing when syncs

[breezanemom]

What I don't understand is that when I returned from my almost hour-long walk (3.66 miles at an average pace of 17 minutes/mile according to RunKeeper) it said I had 56 Active Minutes, but when it synced later in the day (about 1 hour later), it said only 2 Active Minutes.  Why the difference?  That makes no sense whatsoever.

Can someone please explain????

Thanks!

Lisa

[Colinm39]

I can only repeat from other posts. I believe the Active Minutes are a total of Moderate and Very Active Minutes (VAM).

When you sync the Dashboard only shows VAM. If you want more VAM, in my case I have to keep the Fitbit tracking in excess of 7 calories/minute (35 calories/5 minutes). That will depend whether you can see the calories on the display on your Fitbit.

There are a few posts but here is one that may fit your query

http://www.fitbit.com/forums/post/4KTZ2J9SZH5LT/4KTZ2J9SKWN3R/moderate%20active%20iphone

[breezanemom]

Thanks for the help.

My FitBit Flex dashboard on my phone originally showed 56 Active minutes then dropped to 2.  I can’t imagine that my walk was only 2 minutes Moderately or Very Active……usually the dashboard is pretty close to what my walking time is.  It is just very, very strange.

How do I change the dashboard from Very Active to Moderately Active?  Or can I even do that?  Is there a way to see the Moderately Active minutes?  Walking for an hour then only seeing the Very Active minutes as 2 is pretty depressing.  And now the app on my iPhone only says 2 minutes.

Starting to wonder if the FitBit was worth the money....I can get a lot of this information from other apps that are free.

Lisa

[Colinm39 · Accepted solution]

When you click on the Very Active Minutes tile, you then click the grey ALL and the three types of activity are revealed. When you hover your mouse on the vertical bar it will give you the breakdown in minutes.

I'm in continual dialogue with Fitbit because I firmly believe there is an error in the VAM algorithm.  The following graph shows that when you compare my constant steps and I need a minimum of 7 calories for one minute of VAM and in this case I only received 8 minutes from 38 minutes.

If I walk at 4.0+mph I get about 50% VAM but the total calories divided by time in minutes would give me 100% VAM. When I walk faster I get more 8, 9 and 10 calorie spikes
with many 6 calorie spikes. The total of these recently on a 53 minute walk exceeded 420 calories which divided by the 53 minutes would give me an average of 8 calories/minute rounded.  

The steps and pace were consistent therefore there should not have been the spikes.

[breezanemom · Accepted solution]

Thank you so much for the information!  I didn't know you could look at the different types of "active" minutes and was getting quite discouraged.  You brought me hope!

Colin, you are awesome!  Thank you again for all of your help with this!

Lisa

[Colinm39]

Thanks for the note. I will always help where possible because the more Fitbitters we can help, feel comfortable with the product, more will purchase, and hopefully keep a strong reneue stream so that the Fitbit developers can improve their products.

[LadyIvy24]

I found that my VAM changed when I input an activity for the time period I was earning VAM.  When I removed the activity my VAM went back up.  Might be a glich for all or just me.

[Colinm39]

What you have observed is the other issue. If the total calories for the activity are not greater than your minutes for the activity, multiplied by the calories for 1 x VAM minute, the graph you see for your calories gets flattened out, no peaks and it is seen as lower activity than VAM.

You need to establish how many calories are in 1 x VAM minute. In your case you can do that by examining the Dashboard VAM before and after the manual activity giving your the difference. Then,deleting the activity, counting the peaks that should equal the VAM difference, and those with the lowest calories should be your minimum calories for 1 x VAM minute.

If you look at the 6th picture in the Fitbit Profile, I created some simple manual activities to establish what my active minutes "break points" were. I had better update that for the new calculations and changes in activity type, but when looking at your profile graphs these colours are still relevant.

On the new active minutes, the graph in my pictures is still current for the number of calories/5 minutes except RED has become GREEN, YELLOW remains, and BLUE became RED and they have eliminated sedentary and included it with RED.

[cand3la]

Hello Everyone,

I have a different scenario that I was wondering if someone could help me figure out. I typically run the treadmill at 2.2 mph for 25 minutes in the morning. On February 20 2014, I ran 27 minutes at 2.2 miles with 4,060 steps. My total active minutes for the day were 29 minutes and I see green on my graph.

I work at a big office and sometimes I get up to walk to the other side of the building, which I did that day about 2 minutes or more. Today I ran 45 minutes at 2.3 mph with a total of 5,318 steps. I did not walk to the other side of the building today but somehow I got zero active minutes with no green.

Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks for your help.

[cand3la]

Hello Everyone,

I just took a closer look at I notice that my minutes for On February 20 2014 are together and they spike to total over 2k steps in green. The steps for today are broken apart into bars that do not even reach 2k which are yellow. I did not stop in the middle of working on the treadmill. Does anyone know why the step lines are broke apart today when they were solid the previous day? Is there something I am doing wrong on the treadmill?

Thank you so much.

[Colinm39]

@cand3laYou are doing nothing wrong. I have reported this oddity to Support when my Ultra and One gave me similar results. The embedded graph shows you my results where I received 26 minutes of VAM out of 53 minutes (any spike of 7 calories and above = 1 x VAM), but if I manually apply the total calories of 373 to the 53 minutes I would get 100% VAM.  I need 34 calories/5 minutes to achieve 5 x VAM.

You will notice the steps are very constant and this was walking on flat pavement with no gradients.

[cand3la]

Thank you so much @Colinm39 . I wish fitbit fixes the error.

[slysam]

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@LadyIvy24 wrote:

I found that my VAM changed when I input an activity for the time period I was earning VAM.  When I removed the activity my VAM went back up.  Might be a glich for all or just me.

---

This is because the standard for very active minutes slightly changes when you manually log an activity--the same thing happens to me. For fitbit tracked activity, it is minute by minute so it depends how much, how fast and how big or impacted the movement was that minute. For manually logged activity, whatever fitbit credited is overwritten. The new standard is calorie burn per minute--actually it is "average calorie burn per minute" through the duration of the logged activity since the calories burned are evenly divided among the duration. It is actually harder to earn very active minutes this way if it is an activity fitbit can track well like walking or jogging. Walking is generally considered to be moderate not vigorous activity by the Center for Disease Control standards, but if you don't log it sometimes fitbit will credit some, most or all your brisk walking as VAM if you walk fast enough and sustain the pace for at least a minute. I am 5' 1" and the pace I need to walk is 4 mph or more, at 4mph some of a walk will earn VAM and some in the same walk moderately active minutes. When you removed your logged activity, it restored what fitbit would have credited you with so that is why you saw an increase.

[slysam]

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@cand3la wrote:

Hello Everyone,

I have a different scenario that I was wondering if someone could help me figure out. I typically run the treadmill at 2.2 mph for 25 minutes in the morning. On February 20 2014, I ran 27 minutes at 2.2 miles with 4,060 steps. My total active minutes for the day were 29 minutes and I see green on my graph.

I work at a big office and sometimes I get up to walk to the other side of the building, which I did that day about 2 minutes or more. Today I ran 45 minutes at 2.3 mph with a total of 5,318 steps. I did not walk to the other side of the building today but somehow I got zero active minutes with no green.

Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks for your help.

---

Are you logging this or is it fitbit tracked? I don't typically see very active minutes at a pace of 2.2 mph, walking I see VAM at 4mph or faster. I think I've seen it with a lower pace jumping rope (though the pace is irrelevant as it isn't a distance activity), so I think it will credit higher for impact activity at a slightly slower pace. I've not really noticed how slow I can run and still see VAM. Does it sometimes grant you VAM? That speed would usually earn me moderately active minutes maybe even lightly active if the impact is very low.

[cand3la]

That is the reason why it does it makes sense to me. Since I got my fitbit (which is resent) I have gotten 5 days with active minutes. On Feb 15 I got 3 minutes, on Feb 16 I got no minutes, on Feb 17 I got 5 minutes, on Feb 18 I got 51 minutes, on Feb 19 I got 33 minutes, and on Feb 20 I got 29 minutes. I usually run manual on a treadmill 30 minutes at 2.2.

However, Feb 21 I ran 45 minutes at 2.3. After I am done, I log my activity. I have not changed anything and still I get these variations. It does not makes any sense to me that I would get such wide variations while I do same or faster, with same minutes of duration. If the speed is the issue then I should have not gotten any active minutes since I started. It still does not make any sense to me.

That is why I was wondering if I was doing something wrong.

[slysam]

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@cand3la wrote:

That is the reason why it does it makes sense to me. Since I got my fitbit (which is resent) I have gotten 5 days with active minutes. On Feb 15 I got 3 minutes, on Feb 16 I got no minutes, on Feb 17 I got 5 minutes, on Feb 18 I got 51 minutes, on Feb 19 I got 33 minutes, and on Feb 20 I got 29 minutes. I usually run manual on a treadmill 30 minutes at 2.2.

However, Feb 21 I ran 45 minutes at 2.3. After I am done, I log my activity. I have not changed anything and still I get these variations. It does not makes any sense to me that I would get such wide variations while I do same or faster, with same minutes of duration. If the speed is the issue then I should have not gotten any active minutes since I started. It still does not make any sense to me.

That is why I was wondering if I was doing something wrong.

---

What happens if you do not log it or delete the logged activity? How are you logging it (entering a distance? HRM calorie burn? etc).

[cand3la]

Hello @slysam,

I try today's as an example. I deleted my log record and I got now 33 active minutes instead of two. I guess I should not be logging my tearmill activity.

[cand3la]

Hello @slysam,

I also notice that my step count went down just like this morning. I am happy about the active minutes but I am not sure about my step count. i will chekc tomorrow after i work out without logging to see if my step counts go down again.

[Colinm39]

I'm coming around to thinking there is a "bounce" effect with the Fitbit's. I say this because a few weeks ago I had 100% VAM and I had to research it. The 3D accelerometer within Fitbit

Part of my lower back exercises is now sitting on an exercise ball and bouncing at about 100 steps/minute (as recorded by Fitbit) for core strength.  100% VAM and more calories than me walking at 4.5 kmh. Hence the bounce effect.

So on treadmills, can we experience the same thing ?

[cand3la]

@Colinm39 tat is a really good question.