My active minutes was HOW LITTLE???

[OldButActive]

You just finished a fantastic walk.  You are sitting in your living room, sweat pouring off you in sheets, and you quickly anticipate what your results will be.  It winds and grinds and finally you get your results.  It seemed like a solid 20 minutes of work and yet you see a lot of yellow lines and very few green lines and even less Very Active Minutes on your dashboard!  Well -- here is why!

One scenario I will show you is walking to lunch.  I go to the 5th floor at exactly 11:30, walk down the the first floor and across the street to the restaurant, then sit to eat lunch.  I return to the office leaving at 12:20 and I'm back at the office walking the same amount of time and distance.  Yet when I look at the results I have one yellow line and 2 orange lines. Why?

Because I began at 11:30 all of my walking in the 15 minutes it took to get to the restaurant was accumulated into that single frame of time.  ( I think it was around 1450 steps )  The count in steps was a big woohoo to the application as I got a nice, yellow line.  But coming back I was not starting my walk right at the start of a quarter hour.  As a result my time got broken up into two different time buckets and the count per time bucket was below the trigger for active walking!

Active time is also measured this way but it is measured in 5 minute time buckets.  So for that 15 minute walk, if I actually began at 11:32:30 then it will only count the number of steps that are in the remaining time between 11:32:30 and 11:35:00.  From this point forward the measurement of your activity is all dependant on two or three things: how quickly are you taking steps, how consistently you are taking those steps, and how focused you are on making sure your steps pace is consistent.  Then that block of time/counts is further cut up into 1 minute intervals to compute your active minutes.  Now for me, I tend to get lost on the sights around me, the smell of the air, and thoughts about what I may go do tonight.  As a result my pace is not exactly rigid!

You could vary your pace just a little bit and end up with a 5 minute block that is considered very active followed immediately by a 5 minute block that isn't.  If you miss it by even 1 step it is not considered very active.  And that is what the activiy window is displaying: how many minutes your step count happens to cross the threshold to be considered very active.  

Now what I've found is this: if I take smaller steps, take them very quickly and maintain that pace with focused attention on just moving each step, I can get very active time up there.  It seems to be around 3 steps per second.  But I also find that when I'm walking at a comfortably brisk pace I actually sit around 1.5 to 2 steps per second.  So think of a little wave moving below a line and that wave occasionally swells up then moves down for a while then moves up for a little bit again.  Very active minutes, then is measured only when that wave blips up above that line.  You can maintain it at that pace easier on a treadmill, but for enjoying the scenery and walking at your own pace you will waver your speed up and down based on many things around you.

So if you take a long walk, and you had stopped occasionally because your Maltese wants to smell a great bit of gossip from another dog, do not expect many green or yellow lines and even less Very Active Time!!  But in the long run which matters more?  What the graph says or what your body had just completed?  🙂

[NewDawn]

What matters most is what the body has just completed!

Your post was most appreciated. I am disabled so for me slow is very active and the days that I do much it still leaves me as not having been very active. The dog walking is the best example and is where I manage to get most of my steps. A clearer perspective is the result of reading your post; thank you.

[Harleen]

Very helpful information, i was always wondering this that my routine is almost same everyday with almost same time breaks i.e. i go for coffee break almost at same same time for same duration of time, but still get so much of variations sometimes i get active minutes sometimes not.

 Now i think may be because of 5 min buckets.

[Heybales]

Good info for people to understand.

As to changing stride to get the VAM - why not just change your stride length setting to something longer but very wrong so it adds up the distance quicker and gives you VAM time?

Same thing, right, fooling the system to reach a goal?

[slysam]

Maybe I am misunderstanding, but the activity minutes are in one minute increments. I often have "very active" minutes that do not divide into five minutes. At one point yesterday, I had 7 very active minutes. I will often have 30 or so VAM, but no green on my graph (or one or two bars green, sometimes none). That is because the graph is showing the "average" activity level for those 15 minutes so each 15 minute contain a mix of different intensities. Same with if you can see the old five minute graph (which I prefer as I am more likely to see where my VAM came from on the five minute graph). But as far as the graph goes, that is more the presentation than how VAM are calculated. I still get VAM when fitbit estimates that I burned over 6 times my resting rate. I have to walk over 4mph and sustain that speed over a minute to see a VAM minute though. If I log a walk, it has to be 4.5 mph or more in speed. I agree it is easier to maintain that on a treadmill since it controls your pace, naturally I tend to walk slower and speed up minute by minute without realizing it. If I am walking to upbeat music I tend to see more VAM. I agree with much of the OP, just the VAM is minute by minute. I usually have very od numbers like 41 minutes, 7 minutes, 23 minutes, etc. And often none show on the 15 minute graph at all.