Drums or Drumming Tracking

[sugglew]

There are some posts around he forum regarding tracking drum playing including a suggestion of adding it to the list of trackable activities (which seems to me a great idea). Since there’s no drum tracking I’ve been testing different excercise trackings to see if one would be a reasonable drum tracker. 

Theoretically I think what we need for drumming is something that tracks heart rate but not steps. I’ve tested rowing, boxing, workout, yoga and Pilates with 1 hour 20 mins of activity with avg HR of 125BPM.

- rowing was off the charts

- Boxing (which in retrospect does count steps I guess) way overestimates at 999kcals

- Workout at 509kcals seems excessive

- yoga at 364kcals also seems excessive

 - pilates seems reasonable at 262kcals

Hopefully that might help some drummers. 

[Heybales]

Nice break down of potentially equal workout entries to use.

While HR-based calorie burn can be useful for exercise in the aerobic range, I'd wonder if normal drumming would be so near the bottom of that range it would have the normal issue of calculations giving an inflated calorie burn?

The database of METS values that Fitbit and others uses actually has drumming in it - 2 levels.

Each database user chooses what to include and what to leave out - years ago Fitbit went through the list and removed many entries that were likely very unused.

https://sites.google.com/site/compendiumofphysicalactivities/compendia

Anyway, they have:

10040  METS 3.8 - music playing drums, sitting
10045  METS 3.0 - music playing drumming (e.g., bongo, conga, benbe), moderate, sitting

Those 2 METS levels are the same as 

Pilates is 3.0 - so perfect match.

Gymnastics is 3.8 - I'm guessing that's lower than I'd think because there is standing time between active times.

So selecting a workout name doesn't cause METS values to be used - that merely says to use this text label on this activity, and calorie burn is per HR still (except for some devices and Weights workout).

To confirm you got the METS level burn you'd have to manually enter a Workout Record and select the entry.

That would make sure if you were dehydrated or hot and your HR went higher than normal for those reasons - you weren't getting more calorie burn than likely.

For even more info, one was estimated, one based on an actual study.

10040 2010 METS 4.0 - Drums, sitting - 2011 METS 3.8 - (Passmore and Durnin 1955)

10045 2010 METS 3.0 - Drumming (e.g., bongo, conga, benbe),

moderate, sitting - 2011 METS 3.0 - ESTIMATED

In the study they actually hooked them up to the face masks for indirect calorimetry.

That would have been interesting watching someone play the drums hooked up to the bigger equipment in 1955!

https://journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/physrev.1955.35.4.801

[JuanJoFitbit]

@sugglew @Heybales Welcome to our Fitbit Community. I really appreciate your feedback and I'd like your ideas to implement an exercise log when playing a musical instrument like drums.

I'd like you to give your votes to this Feature Suggestion. The more votes this request gets, the more chances it will have to be reviewed by our team.

See you guys around.