What is a light activity?

[Grippy19]

Hi there,

So I use a dietary app called Lifesum and it syncs with Fitbit. On Lifesum it’s logs that I have 4hrs and 7m of light activity which supposedly burns 473 calories? What is light activity? Is that walking and standing and stuff?

I do commute on a campus and work at a coffee shop where I move lightly. Does that make sense to burn that many calories in that amount of time? I don’t want it to be logging that if it’s not accurate.

Thank you!

Moderator edit: subject for clarity

[AlejandraFitbit]

Hey @Grippy19, it's great to see you around.

Can you please be more specific about this? Are you seeing that on the Fitbit app or in the Lifesum app? In the meantime, I recommend taking a look at the following links:

• How does my Fitbit device calculate my daily activity?
• How do I track exercise and activity with my Fitbit device?
• How accurate are Fitbit devices?

Catch you later. 

[Grippy19]

It shows this on the Lifesum app! But it’s coming from Fitbit. Nowhere in the forums do I see “light activity” which is why I’m confused. Haha

[AlejandraFitbit]

Thanks for the information @Grippy19 and for the screenshot.

I consider "Walk" as a light activity. Have you been walking a lot? You can check in the exercise tile from the Fitbit app which activities you have done and see which one can be considered as light.

See you around. 

[DragonSword2]

I also use the Lifesum app and is wondering the same thing. 

In Lifesum it says "Light Activity 192 minutes", but nowhere in the fitbit app can I find a corresponding exercise for those 192 minutes, or exercises that adds up to that.

Does Light Activity mean like "192 minutes where heart rate is above some %age of max hr" ? Then I guess the question is what that heart rate %age is?

[duffycola]

I am confused too and think it is too high in Lifesum.

Activity today:

* Walk staircase up and down like ~15 times (Fitbit says 37 times)

* Cycle 60 minutes

* Swim 2km / 1.5 hours

* Chill in the garden

Fitbit:

* 169 active minutes (all around lunch), 9072 steps, 37 floors, 6,87km, 4248 kcal

* swimming recognised well: 1h26 (+69 active minutes), 2100m, 630kcal

Lifesum displays three categories:

* light activity 2:57h, 224kcal (=> 1.3kcal/min)

* high-intensity exercise 1h36, 1217kcal (=> 12.67kcal/min )

* low-intensity exercise 1h13, 370kcal (=> 5kcal/min)

Apparently 1h36 + 1h13 low+high exercise = 169 active minutes.

Swimming added only 69 active training minutes.

Remaining 27 may be high pulse right after the swim, few moments during cycling. Idk.

Cycling must account for most of low-intensity, but a few minutes are missing again.

So during the day if the trigger is right, activity minutes add up to little more than what is obvious from the pure training.

However, I find the calorie numbers in lifesum maybe a bit too high.

Swimming was definitely the most intense activity today.

Fitbit did well in time+distance, so I trust 7kcal/min.

Lifesum, however, takes it as 12kcal/min.

Also most other activites were far less intense, yet some 27 minutes of 12kcal are added.

As for low-intensity, 5kcal/min for cycling seems fair.

The light activity seems absolutely negligible and could be the stairs.

However, I believe Fitbit is tracking the stairs both up and down, giving it again a false sense of twice as many calories.

Personal takeaways:

* Lifesum kcal seems too high for me.

* Lifesum exercise kcal seems too high in fitbit-unrelated presets too.

* I don't trust the light activity, also it seems negligible.

* I would either track trainings manually

* Or keep it automatic but delete the light and low activity groups, to balance the high-intensity exercise numbers.

[duffycola]

PS the central message is that low+high intensity exercise come from active minutes, which are >3MET, so anything <3MET/<=3MET must account for light activity.

Note, I definitely did not walk stairs for 3hours, so it must include non-resting activities, really low activities such as steps, unless your heart rate goes up to 3/4MET.........

A little confusing indeed!