Manual recording of Nordic walking

[grebe42]

Fitbit clearly does not know what Nordic walking is. When I enter it manually and add small number of calories (Nordic walking uses more energy then normal walking) fitbit deletes 300 or more calories and changes activity colour on chart from intense to light!

[YojanaFitbit]

Hi @grebe42, so glad to see you here! Thanks for the steps that you've tried until now. 

I don't think that the option Nordic walking is in the list of activities for now. In this case, it's best to create a custom activity since Nordic walking will burn more calories, raising your heart rate higher and you'll walk faster than ordinary walking; but Fitbit Zip doesn't have Hearth Rate option to track this information.

You can follow these steps on your computer:

1. Log into your fitbit.com dashboard.

2. Click on the Log>Activities option. You can find it at the top of the page.

3. You will see the option "Create a Custom activity" on the right, next to the "Log Activities" option.

4. Fill out all the fields (date, distance, duration, start time and calories) of your activity. 

5. Click Log Activity. Your activity will now be visible and editable in the Logged Activities area. It will give you a calculation of steps depending on the distance.

I hope this information helps. Happy stepping!

[grebe42]

That's exactly how I did it. I only put in 50 calories since some had already been included. About 300 calories were then deducted. I'm not really counting calories but I'm intrigued as to how my totals are worse for having done this activity.

I put in 210 calories for I hour 25 Nordic walking and this time it only deducted 45 calories! Next time I go Nordic walking I'll note the starting distance (ie the walking I've done previously round the house etc) and at the finish to see if it's all more accurate when distance is included as well.

No this did not answer my query. I already know how to enter activities manually so it didn't help. The system is still making out that Nordic walking is less energetic than normal walking. It deducts from my total calories for the day and changes the colour of the period of Nordic walking from intense to moderate. Hopeless!

[YojanaFitbit · Accepted solution]

Thanks for your response and for trying the suggested steps @grebe42. 

At  this moment there isn't any other way to enter that specific information. Since if you log this activity, it will take the steps that did during that time to get the intensity; as this tracker doesn't have Heart Rate incorporated to calculate that information in a better way.

For most manually logged activities, Fitbit uses a standard MET score and your (optional) calorie burn to calculate active minutes. High calorie burn activities award more active minutes. Since custom activities don't have a MET score associated, you'll only get active minutes for them if you also log a high calorie burn. You can read more information about it here: What are active minutes?

I found online a way to calculate calories burned from Nordic walking, by doing the following: The total number of calories burned for any task is calculated by first finding the calorie burn per minute - this is done by multiplying the MET value of the task by the person's body weight in kg and 3.5, then dividing that number by 200. Calorie burn per minute is then multiplied by the amount of time that the task is performed to find the total calories burned from the activity. This was taken from the web, maybe you can find other way.

I'm very interested in keep assisting you. Please let me know if you have more questions.