activity minutes

[allisami]

I did a triathlon today and only got 7 miles of credit (ran 3 rode 14) and 71 minutes of activity minutes.  I don't expect perfection but i was around 2 hours total, so it was missing at least 30 minutes of activity.... also has done this before on bike but was better when I put on my shoe.  Any suggestions?

[smhermione]

You may do better by logging the bike riding as an activity rather than letting the tracker try to track it.  Your tracker is designed to track steps and since riding a bike has less impact than walking it won't track all of your steps.

[Heybales]

Do you expect it to track your swimming for "steps" or calorie burn?

I'm assuming an answer of "of course not, didn't even wear it" perhaps.

Why? Because you know that it was not designed for that.

It was not designed for biking either, neithing reading the non-impacting of pedaling or the formula for calorie burn to be correct.

Just because you may be able to better pick up half the steps (yep, half) by putting it on your ankle, still doesn't change the fact the steps are wrong and the calorie burn is wrong.

Congrats on the Sprint-Tri.

Since you know the distance, you know the time, manually log it all. I'd say even the run if there were hills. Because guess what else it wasn't designed for?

[allisami]

well then I guess I don't understand activity minutes.  I was active..... I did not expect it to count swimming but it gave me credit for 7 miles which is neither the distance i ran or biked... very confusing to me.  I will however enter the distances manually.

i am realizing this is a fancy pedometer.... but still better than nothing i guess.

[Heybales]

Very Active Minutes is when your calorie burn, Fitbit seen or from manual entry, is 6x your resting calorie burn.

You'll hit it on your manual entries.

Active Minutes is some other multiple I don't have memorized right now.

Pedometers usually have a fixed stride length, it sees an impact, heres the length walked.

Fitbit can tell from impact if long or shorter step, air time, running or walking, ect. That all effects the length, and length and time is pace, and pace and mass is calorie burn.

And if your default calculated on height stride length is off, then the above math will be off.

That's why if you have a treadmill you can get better walking and running stride length and correct those values.