Did anybody else's active minutes just change?
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gle8442
Posts: 126 Member
I just updated the FitBit app on my iPhone and suddenly I have way more active minutes than before I updated. It seems to have added active minutes to all my days this week too. Did anyone else notice something like that? What's going on?
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Yep. Noticed that too0
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They have changed the algorithm before.
At a basic level, they were following the CDC recommendations of getting Active exercise time that was 3 x your resting metabolism rate for so much time daily, and Very Active time 6 x that rate.
But they tweaked that basic formula for step based workouts so that if the pace seemed high enough, you'd get those minutes even if the calorie burn didn't exactly make it high enough.
So that's why you could look through your daily graph of calorie burn, and see bars that were taller and yellow, but some shorter and green.
Of course with taller with more calorie burn, shorter with less.
Seemed totally wacko until I found out what they were doing.
Many people were experimenting with paces to figure out those change over points.
Now a manually entered workout still goes by that simple math of calorie burn and resting burn rate, for the whole block of time being entered in.0 -
Yep.
https://community.fitbit.com/t5/News-Announcements/Active-Minutes-Update-amp-Clarification/m-p/737364#U737364
All Fitbit trackers are now looking at Active Minutes in the same way. To align with CDC recommendations, this new metric more accurately reflects a combination of your moderate and high-intensity exercise.
For Flex, One, Zip, and Ultra users: you previously saw only Very Active Minutes contribute toward your daily Active Minutes goal. Beginning in April 2015, you'll start seeing both Very Active and Moderately Active Minutes combined to calculate this total, in the same way that other trackers currently operate. As a result, you'll now notice:
A higher active minutes total than you previously saw when only tracking very active minutes.
An improved ranking in group leaderboards for active minutes.
An increase in active minutes when you look at data for previous days.
All of these improvements are designed to give you a more accurate view of your active time throughout the day, and to put everyone on the same Active Minutes metric.0 -
I'm really confused by this. My active minutes for previous day's has more than doubled. But yesterday and today it's giving me way less than expected. Yesterday after updating my active minutes went from 97 to 60 (so only showing my swimming minutes, not my step active minutes). Today it's given me 8 active step minutes, but then no others for other running I've done.0
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It makes sense that they had to make it work the same for all trackers, since you can now have multiple trackers on one account.
I had noticed the change when I switched from my One to my Charge HR back in January. It bothered me because the need to get 10 consecutive active minutes (from FitBit's help article: "To stay in line with the Center for Disease Control's (CDC’s) “10 minutes at a time is fine” concept, minutes are only awarded after 10 minutes of continuous moderate-to-intense activity.") meant that I no longer got any "active minutes" only "very active minutes" (when I was deliberately exercising). So, my total (active + very active) went down. A lot. It bugged me because I'd been really trying to boost that "active" number by just moving more when I wasn't exercising. But, I got used to it. Instead of watching for "active" minutes, I switched to trying to make sure I had some steps in every 15 minute segment of my Activity tile on my dashboard.
Lately, I've been getting some plain old "active minutes" because I have a book I want to get through and I've been doing a loop walking around the house while reading. That's just enough to trigger active minutes for me.0 -
I'm really confused by this. My active minutes for previous day's has more than doubled. But yesterday and today it's giving me way less than expected. Yesterday after updating my active minutes went from 97 to 60 (so only showing my swimming minutes, not my step active minutes). Today it's given me 8 active step minutes, but then no others for other running I've done.
Did you manually enter in the running as a workout, rather than letting Fitbit just use it's stats?
For a manually entered workout, Active minutes is 3 x resting calorie burn, Very Active is 6 x. Your pace doesn't matter - so if the total average doesn't work out, you get none.
But using Fitbit stats where it looks at each minute, and pace is a factor, you could get some out of a workout that could have none when averaged over the whole time.
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