Fitbit removing active minutes when entered as exercise

[HLW]

Exercise walks, when syncing, show up as active minutes. I would also like these walks to show up in the "track exercise" section for a variety of reasons, including the fact that my health club doesn't recognize them as exercise otherwise. Starting a few days ago, when I manually enter the minutes walked, they are removed from the active minutes. The manual entry should not ADD to the minutes if they correspond to already counted minutes however they should not remove them either. I just went in and removed all my manually entered exercise days for this week and the active minutes all came back, however now my exercise goals show zero days and my health club (which runs competitions) logs zero qualifying workouts.

If I manually add something not walking, like swimming, it shows up as active minutes and exercise days. If I manually add a walk that doesn't correspond to active minutes, as if I took the walk without wearing the zip, it shows up as exercise but doesn't add to or remove active minutes.

This started in the last few days and it is really not cool. I am on the most recent version of the software. The most recent posts I can find regarding this are from 2016. 

[LucyAP]

Welcome to the Forums @HLW! Thanks for sharing your experience with your Zip tracker and the log feature. Also, for all the troubleshooting steps you took before posting here. 

Active minutes are a measurement of time spent doing activity that is more intense than regular walking. If after reading the article What are active minutes? you want more information on how metabolic equivalents (METs) are calculated, we recommend the wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_equivalent.

While adding a manual activity all steps, calories, and active minutes recorded by your tracker are overridden for the duration of a manually logged activity by the activity's entered values. This ensures that your steps are not counted twice as long as the manually logged activity has the correct start time and duration. 

To have a better active minutes reading when manually logging, you can try logging the intensity instead of the distance. To do so, you need to: 

1. Log into your fitbit.com dashboard.
2. At the top of the page click  Log > Activities.
3. Click a common activity or search for one. If the activity is not in our system, create your own by clicking the Create custom activity text that appears below the search field.
4. Enter the duration, distance or intensity (if applicable), and start time of your activity. You can enter the number of calories burned if you'd like to.

      5. Click Log. Your activity will now be visible and editable in the Activity History area.

I hope this helps, keep me posted! 🙂 

[Rich_Laue]

When manually adding a walk/run Fitbit uses the users strife setting to calculate the steps. 

If the step count is off. this would be a good indication that the stride setting is not correct.