Manually Tracking Yoga, swimming, weights

[senora75]

I understand that to track non-step based activities like yoga, swimming, or weight lifting, I must manually enter the time and activity. What I don't understand is whether the calorie information is based only on the time expended. For instance, my exertion level when I swim varies depending on what stroke I am swimming -- freestyle, back stroke, breast stroke. Likewise, there are many styles of yoga (I teach yoga, so I am well aware of this!): restorative yoga is like taking a nap, ashtanga yoga is like jogging, hatha yoga is usually somewhere in between, etc. The same variability in weight lifting occurs.

Is there any way to adjust this? Or to know what level of exertion is being used to calculate this? I've spent nearly a half hour all over the community and help sites, and if the information is there, I can't find it! Thanks. I hope someone can answer this.

[MakMak · Accepted solution]

Hi, @senora75! You are correct, the default calories in the manual activities are just an estimate based on your input body information and duration. You can check out other sites on the web that do a really nice calculation of calories. I don't have any specific ones, but if you search for exercise and calorie burn, there are some calculators out there that do some really nice listings of different activities.

[senora75]

Thanks, this is what I figured I'd have to do, but hoped I was wrong! Sparkpeople.com has good calorie counters in their fitness section, and I used to be an active member, so I visited their site. By putting in my weight, time, and type of swimming stroke, I could contract a fairly accurate calorie count for my specific workout. This of course will change as my weight goes down and the time spent swimming increases, but I can live with that. It would just be nice if there were some way to do this directly on the Fitbit site. (By the way, I was also able to get similar information on various kinds of yoga, although I don't know how they derived their numbers.

For others reading these posts, someone also suggested healthstatus.com, although I have not checked out this particular site.