Why doesn't my fitbit track all my active exercise?

[KrupaP]

I very often notice, like today, when I went for a 45 min run only stopping to pick up a toothbrush at Morrisons and then run back that it only logged 13 min of activity. What's going on?

[emili · Accepted solution]

which fitbit do you have? if you have one with a stop watch feature you can click it on and it will count the activity for as long as you leave the stopwatch running. It will of course give you wrong pace info if you stop at the store, but the minutes will be what you are looking for. Active minutes are also measured by how long you are performing an activity. so if you run for 7 minutes, stop and shop then run 13 more- it will only give you credit for the 13...

[KrupaP]

It's the Alta standard and no stopwatch. But I carried on running after my shop ...really strange 

thank you. 

[Dominique]

The Alta / Alta HR relies on autodetection of activities, within the constraints mentioned by @emili. Active minutes also have their own threshold before they are accounted for.

However, your total activity will always be accounted for via calories burned and steps, even if the thresholds for activities and active minutes aren’t met, or only partially so. I therefore wouldn’t worry too much about being "short-changed".

[Kimiski]

Is this the same reason as to why:

There's been two instances where I would walk, or even speed walk on the treadmill for 30-40 minutes, then I would do a burst run for the last 10 minutes. It counted my steps for everything, but it didn't count my walking, only the last 10 minutes I ran under my workout section. 

Is it supposed to do that or am I missing something? 
This happened on both an Alta HR and a Charge 2. 

I often will walk, run, walk, and run again on the treadmill, how can I get it to track all of this under workout? Or will it not? 

[Colinm39]

@KimiskiAre we talking about Auto tracked exercises or Active minutes..?

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@Kimiskiwrote:

Is this the same reason as to why:

There's been two instances where I would walk, or even speed walk on the treadmill for 30-40 minutes, then I would do a burst run for the last 10 minutes. It counted my steps for everything, but it didn't count my walking, only the last 10 minutes I ran under my workout section. 

Is it supposed to do that or am I missing something? 
This happened on both an Alta HR and a Charge 2. 

I often will walk, run, walk, and run again on the treadmill, how can I get it to track all of this under workout? Or will it not? 

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[Kimiski]

Auto tracked exercise. 

It will say I ran for the 10 minutes, but it did not track the 40 minute walk previous to it. 

[Colinm39]

@KimiskiWhen I was having that issue I set all of my Auto Recognition (Autotrack) exercises to the minimum of 10 minutes..  Now I get Sport if I'm gardening and odd resemblances of the other exercises..  I try to analyze the movements and when it tracks I can probably visualize what Fitbit has deduced.

The Fitbit help doesn't tell us how much intensity of a particular exercise pattern we need but we know it needs a minimum that has been set in your PC Desktop settings for each Fitbit you are using

This help lead you through it..

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@Kimiskiwrote:

Auto tracked exercise. 

It will say I ran for the 10 minutes, but it did not track the 40 minute walk previous to it. 

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[SunsetRunner]

@Kimiski my answer probably won't be much help for you but except walking all auto recognized exercises I keep turned off. I don't want Fitbit to recognize anything if I don't qualify it as an exercise. Everything else I turn on manually using shortcuts when I start to exercise and turn off when I end it. Before I had weird detections ( for example driving car detected as cycling 😉 ). I don't mind detecting walking though as despite it is an activity I don't see it as a form of exercise and it happens sort of "automatically" during the day.

[Kimiski]

I might just have to start doing that unless a moderator can give me a good answer. It's really odd and annoying that I can go on a 40 minute walk, and then decide to jog  for 10 minutes, and then all that's counted is my 10 minutes. 

The more and more I own a FitBit, the more tweaking and manual overrides I seem to have to do to get things to work the way I want/ what they should be already. Why did I pay $149 something for a device I have to alter and go in and tune all these settings to to get to work just as it should? =/