What am I not understanding about Active Minutes?
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PartyingPlatapus
Posts: 7 Member
I suspect that either I am misunderstanding "active minutes", or my Fitbit One has accuracy issues.
On days that I do nothing more than walk around the grocery store or walk my dog for a few minutes at the park, my Fitbit dash says I have 9 Active Minutes, or 15 Active Minutes.
But today when I walked on the treadmill for an hour, I have ZERO active minutes.
There's no way I'm walking faster when I'm wandering through the grocery store than when I'm on the treadmill.
On days that I do nothing more than walk around the grocery store or walk my dog for a few minutes at the park, my Fitbit dash says I have 9 Active Minutes, or 15 Active Minutes.
But today when I walked on the treadmill for an hour, I have ZERO active minutes.
There's no way I'm walking faster when I'm wandering through the grocery store than when I'm on the treadmill.
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My guess would be that the issue is how Fitbit works. Fitbit senses forward movement. When you are walking on a treadmill you are not actually moving forward you are moving in place. It might not be picking up much activity when you are on the treadmill.0
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I thought that might be the case.
Do the Fitbits that track heart rate work differently?0 -
Actually - it sees impact of your steps, forward movement not required at all.
Jogging in place is just fine too because of that fact.
The hang time with stride length stat, the impact with weight stat, all give enough info to figure out what the actual stride length was for that step. Additional info can be gained by the accelerometer showing forward movement, but it doesn't effect the calculations as much as the other things seen.
Did you manually log that treadmill workout?
When you manually log a workout, you must meet different requirements for AM and VAM compared to if Fitbit saw the steps itself.
Or did you wear it on the wrist (you could be, there are straps), and death grip treadmill handrails?0 -
I wound up manually logging the time later because Fitbits calculations seemed so off.
When I walk the same number of steps around the park, MFP will say I've earned about 300 extra calories (just from the information gathered from Fitbit). But when I walk on the treadmill it displays no Active Minutes and my MFP calorie adjustment was only 50 calories.
I wore my Fitbit on my pants and I know it was counting steps correctly, but for some reason those steps didn't translate into Active Minutes or calorie adjustment.
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pepperjohnrogers wrote: »I wound up manually logging the time later because Fitbits calculations seemed so off.
When I walk the same number of steps around the park, MFP will say I've earned about 300 extra calories (just from the information gathered from Fitbit). But when I walk on the treadmill it displays no Active Minutes and my MFP calorie adjustment was only 50 calories.
Adjustments are the difference between your Fitbit burn (which is TDEE) and your MFP activity level. Click on your adjustment to see the math MFP used to calculate it, but a 50-calorie adjustment means you've burned 50 calories more than your activity level.
Enable negative calorie adjustments in your diary settings: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/account/diary_settings
As for active minutes, mine are often wrong in the Fitbit app but correct on my Fitbit.com dashboard. It's just a bug, and my Fitbit burn is 100% accurate.0 -
pepperjohnrogers wrote: »I wound up manually logging the time later because Fitbits calculations seemed so off.
When I walk the same number of steps around the park, MFP will say I've earned about 300 extra calories (just from the information gathered from Fitbit). But when I walk on the treadmill it displays no Active Minutes and my MFP calorie adjustment was only 50 calories.
I wore my Fitbit on my pants and I know it was counting steps correctly, but for some reason those steps didn't translate into Active Minutes or calorie adjustment.
Read the FAQ in the stickies - you are misunderstanding what you are reading for one thing regarding Fitbit adjusted calories in MFP. It's not the exercise.
Second issue as above - a bug in the app.
Third issue, calorie burn for the walking must be 3 x resting calorie burn to qualify as Active Minutes, for a whole minute at a time on average, usually means no variance is better. Treadmill should be great at that though.
That means at least 2.6 mph if you manually log it. If using Fitbit stats, it depends on what it sees.
When you check the activity record (make one) for your treadmill walk, does the Fitbit stats for that block of time show correct distance compared to treadmill?
If treadmill showed 3 miles in 60 min, and Fitbit showed 2.5 miles in same time - then of course you won't get Active Minutes.
You must adjust the stride length then.
But daily walking can be fooled if carrying more weight than your body weight making impacts look bigger which means bigger steps which means more distance which means faster pace which means bigger calorie burn.0
