Who are these people?

[fitfreak]

Someone please explain to me how on the Fitbit 2014 challenge, someone can have 176,000 steps in the 2 days of August.  That's 88,000 a day.  That's 44 miles.  And people seem to have this level regularly.  What do you DO for a job.....I gotta know????? 

[carl669]

easy.  strap the fitbit on the dog and go to an off-leash park.

[lyro]

Mail carrier? lol

[Heybales]

Take shorter bouncy steps.

Clip to shoe at work, and shake leg all day.

Figure out where to strap the Fitbit so that every non-step thing you do gets counted as steps.

But first you must not care about reality of what a step is, and be totally taken with the idea of hitting a goal number whether what you do literally is a step or not.

[LewWagner]

Fitfreek,

Not tongue in cheek and I'm certainly no uber runner, but for a personal best, I've done 10.22 miles in one day (if Fitbit is to be believed), 22,646 steps, and 3,424 calories.  A personal best for me, but this was all done walking and over three separate walking times.

So, it's conceivable that a person doing some sort of challenge could do 88K steps in  a day.

Lew

[betpchem]

My best was about 50,000 in a day, and that took a while. I'm guessing that people doing 88,000 in a day are training for a marathon or they have jobs that keep them on their feet all day, such as a mailman or waiter. 

[Dominique]

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@betpchem wrote:

My best was about 50,000 in a day, and that took a while. I'm guessing that people doing 88,000 in a day are training for a marathon or they have jobs that keep them on their feet all day, such as a mailman or waiter. 

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No way people who are training for a marathon are running twice the distance of a marathon (which 88,000 steps basically are) in a day. And no mailman or waiter is ever going to get that kind of step count in the course of a working day, no matter how long and busy that day is. People who consistently get 80k+ steps a day, day after day, week after week, month after month, are just plain cheating. It is best to ignore them (I've unfriended such "friends").

I wish Fitbit changed the way steps manually logged (as opposed to steps derived from the tracker) are treated: at the moment, they are not taken into consideration for badges, but they do get into the cumulative 7-day count which is the basis for leaderboards and "competition" with friends. I'm sure some people would still find creative ways to have their tracker report crazily high step counts without actually walking, but this would probably reduce somehow the insane step counts some people claim to have.

Anyway, we should primarily be using our Fitbits for ourselves, to get fitter and healthier. Friendly "competition" against people who actually take steps is OK, blatant cheaters should be ignored.

[xicheng]

You can manually log activities and the steps are calculated by fitbit and counted into the daily summary showing on the dashboard. I believe you can easily become a monster by several keyboards. 

I hope fitbit can setup an option to separate the display of manual logged activities and the actual fitbit steps. 

[Heybales]

Totally forgot - short legs.

[Ukase]

Not sure what activity groups you are in, but if you scope out the over 60 crowd, and even over 70 crowd, you'll see a Sharon A. walk about 20-30 miles per day. There's a guy named Larry that was walking about 35 miles a day for a good stretch - or maybe he was running.

Sharon A. is my mother. She's 74 and she walks in the morning for an hour and a half, probably goes to the gym during the day (too hot in Mobile, AL to walk mid-day) and is on the elliptical for an hour or so, and then walks again in the evening for another hour or so.

When she's not walking and is in the house on the phone, she paces the length of the hallway.

You may rest assured, she doesn't have a dog. She does have a lot of free time because she is retired. She's read up on how older people generally decline when they fall down and can't get up, so she's been meeting with a personal trainer for a couple of years to work on her core strength and balance. I'd say it's money well spent, since she's walking more in a day than I sometimes do in a week.

Now, if only I could get her to make chocolate chip cookies for me...

[betpchem]

Thank you for showing that it is possible to get that many steps without cheating. 

[Dominique]

@Ukase: with all the respect I owe your 74-year-old mother, she's not walking 88,000 steps per day, nor 20-30 miles either. I consider myself fit and when power-walking (at about 7 km/h, ie. 4.3 mph), I would get 9000 steps per hour. If I did that for 1 ½ hours in the morning and the same in the evening, I would get 27,000 steps and about 13 miles. Even if I were "pacing the length of the hallway" at a more leisurely speed for the rest of the day, I would maybe get another 15,000 steps. If you're not convinced, lend her your Fitbit for a day.

[Ukase]

Well, a man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion, still.

I don't think I said she was getting 88000 steps. But, she is averaging - for this week anyway - about 45000 a day.

Her pace on the elliptical is not leisurely, I promise you. She's doing about 10 miles in a little bit over an hour. As for the walking in the mornings and such, the pace is about 3.5-4 mph - at least, that's my guess at the speed when I walk with her. She's getting the green lines for the times that she's walking, so if memory serves, the speed may be at 4.1 mph, but I think Fitbit may have changed the qualifications for very active minutes recently.

You also should realize that - although my mother doesn't - some of these people are running/jogging.

A 10 mile clip in the morning could be 26400 steps. My job had me walk about 10000 steps today - but somedays it's close to 12000. After work, someone might go for another 10 mile clip for another 26400 steps. Then, if I go shopping at the big Wal-mart and park far back from the door because I don't want my doors dinged, I can easily get another 3000. That's 65800. And if I'd run 15 miles in the morning and another 15 in the evening instead of 10, I guess I could exceed that 88000 number.

Personally, I'd be lucky to run for 2 minutes without slowing down to a walk because I haven't run since I was in the military. But, for someone on vacation, or newly retired but still vibrant, a few 10 mile runs aren't that inconceivable for me.

Is it possible that some of these folks are cheating? Sure. I suspect there are a few.

Is it also possible that Fitbit Ones might count fidgeting while watching tv as a lot of steps? Sure. I know my boss got a Fitbit One and he says he gets about 50 steps while driving his car home. <shrug>

My best advice is to not worry about these people. Compete against your best day. We're all different with different obstacles and blessings. Comparing ourselves to others will only eventually leave us bitter and perhaps lead us to give up.

[Algenon]

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My best advice is to not worry about these people. Compete against your best day. We're all different with different obstacles and blessings. Comparing ourselves to others will only eventually leave us bitter and perhaps lead us to give up.

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I agree.  If you need a challenge, just look for someone close to you on the leaderboard as a goal to beat.  

[1coolgyrl]

I totally agree. As a person who competes on the leaderboards and fitbitleague.com it's so annoying to look at the profiles of people who consistenly log 70k+ steps a day, but their highest step badge is 60k!!! I hit 70k on Monday for the first time and it took everything I had (i also earned the badge). there's no way I could do it everyday or even once a week. 

I just started ignoring these people on the leaderboards. In my opinon, adding steps manually is cheating. I wish Fitbit would figure out a fairer way for people to compete. 

[Dominique]

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@Ukase wrote:

But, she is averaging - for this week anyway - about 45000 a day.

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Yes, I see from Sharon A's profile her lowest step count for the past 30 days was 39,605 and her highest 66,264. That would make her a highly atypical 74-year-old American. I guess she must have very good genes and very strong joints (knees, hips) as well.

[Heybales]

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@1coolgyrl wrote:

I totally agree. As a person who competes on the leaderboards and fitbitleague.com it's so annoying to look at the profiles of people who consistenly log 70k+ steps a day, but their highest step badge is 60k!!! I hit 70k on Monday for the first time and it took everything I had (i also earned the badge). there's no way I could do it everyday or even once a week. 

I just started ignoring these people on the leaderboards. In my opinon, adding steps manually is cheating. I wish Fitbit would figure out a fairer way for people to compete. 

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Just keep in mind, if they are indeed cheating for these goals, then ultimately they are just cheating their own fitness or diet goals too - though that may take longer to show up the fact they cheated.

But when they come back at some point way down the road (but not as far as they claim, ha!) wondering why they can't keep losing weight but they walk so many steps per day, or it seems their fitness doesn't progress much, you'll know why.

Usually that mental attitude effects other aspects of life that catch up to them too.

This whole discussion has almost, almost, gotten me interested in calculating my stride length again for faster running pace I'm doing, because now whenever I manually log running to get more accurate calorie count (current goal), my distance and steps actually drops.

[betpchem]

I know someone who has done at least 50,000 steps a day all summer. She is not cheating. She gets up at 4 am to get her steps in. So it is possible. 

[Dominique]

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@betpchem wrote:

I know someone who has done at least 50,000 steps a day all summer. She is not cheating. She gets up at 4 am to get her steps in. So it is possible. 

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Yes, it's possible. That would require at least 6 hours of continuous walking/jogging. So yes, 3 hours in the morning before work, and 3 hours again in the evening after work, plus whatever she can get during the course of the day. The question is: why would someone want to do this? First, there's the law of diminishing returns: you don't get twice as fit with 50,000 steps compared to "only" 25,000 steps. Actually, 50k+ steps a day over a prolonged period of time most probably puts you at risk of developing some kind of injury. I personally think that if someone has six hours to dedicate to exercising on a daily basis, their time would be better spend by doing several varied activities, as opposed to doing only walking/jogging. Now don't tell me that in addition to her 50k+ steps, she also swims, attends zumba classes and lift weights.

[betpchem]

Actually, she's in a contest for the summer. But really, she just likes to walk/run. That's her thinking time.