I’ve had a Fitbit Zip for almost three years and I use the iOS app to sync the data from it. This app lets you track exercise that wasn’t captured in full by the step counter. I use this to add info about weight training and aerobics at the gym.
The active minutes, steps, and distance often do not add up when I add one of these exercises manually. The other day, I took a moderate 1 mile walk but forgot to start the tracking feature in the app. After my walk, this is what my activity looked like.
![screenshot of fitbit app showing 24 minutes of activity, 5319 steps, 2.26 miles](https://www.fishyux.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/fitbit-before-169x300.png)
My stats showed
- 5,319 steps
- 2.26 miles
- 24 active minutes
After I added in my walk manually, the stats updated in an unexpected way.
![screenshot of the Fitbit app showing 5,796 steps, 2.45 miles and 0 active minutes](https://www.fishyux.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/fitbit-after-577x1024.png)
My stats changed to
- 5,796 steps
- 2.45 miles
- 0 active minutes
What? I can’t figure out what Fitbit is trying to do when I log exercise manually. The distance and steps shouldn’t change when those are precisely what the tracker tracks. My active minutes dropping to 0 is what I find most perplexing. How would adding exercise ever reduce active minutes?
By way of comparison, here are my stats from yesterday before and after manually logging 50 minutes of aerobics.
![side by side screenshots showing discrepancies between calories and active minutes](https://racheleditullio.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/fitbit-comparison.png)
Here we see the number of calories burned dropped by 102 while active minutes increased by 10. Again, what? I wasn’t able to find any information from Fitbit about how its software calculates these numbers but I think it’s safe to say, something doesn’t add up.