Yoga Calorie Tracking is Useless

[islandgirlmagic]

Hi, I’ve had my Inspire HR since last year and I’ve mostly been enjoying it.

Since I’ve been stuck at home, yoga and walks are my primary forms of exercise at the moment. I’ll do more yin and restorative occasionally, but most of the time I do more of a vinyasa flow.

I have noticed that whenever I manually log “Yoga” the calorie burn is flat regardless of my heart rate. Oftentimes in these classes I am doing very “calisthenics” type asanas or even a dance yoga workout I do, and often work our hard enough to get a high heart rate. Regardless, the calorie count is always flat and quite low. It’s always 5cal/min every single session even if my heart rate is low in the beginning and gets almost to my peak later in the session.

Today I noticed if I manually logged Yoga, I actually LOST 40+ calories off my daily burn total. This doesn’t make any sense to me. How should I be logging this activity to be most accurate? I suppose I could not manually log it and just use the “active minutes” that are automatically logged, but that defeats the purpose of my exercise goal in the Fitbit app. 

[JohnnyRow]

Actually, as far as daily totals, manually logging an activity is the least accurate way.

When you manually log a workout after the fact, the parameters you input override any data that was actually recorded.  It's as if Fitbit is assuming the reason you manually logged it is because you were not wearing the tracker, which really is the reason to manually log a workout.

The best way is to use the Exercise App.  Before you start, on your wrist, scroll up from the clock face to 'Exercise' and tap that; then scroll down to the the type exercise you are about to do, and tap that.  If yoga is not in the list of 'Exercise Shortcuts', you can add it.  This help section explain how, and more about the Exercise App:

How do I track my workouts with my Fitbit device? 

This way it gets tracked with whatever activity you label it as, you tell it when you start and stop so you get credit for the full time, and it uses the heart rates actually recorded.