Using fitbit and active minutes for logging a run

Hello.

I would like to make myself do some exercise, probably a jog, for a mere 10 minutes a day. The daily thing is important more than the time.

I hold down the button on my fitbit when I start and it is logged as a “workout”. How do I best tell beeminder this is what I would like to log? I’m guessing “active minutes” should do but really I just want to make sure I’ve done some kind of workout. It could be yoga for instance, which doesn’t look very “active”. What do you think?

Thanks

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I think that’s a good argument for frequency goals, i.e. do more often not just do more quantity. That can be achieved with a custom aggregation method but I’m not sure that any of the fitbit measures would work even with a nonzero aggregation.

You might be better off creating a manual goal. Just give yourself a point for every day that you exercised, and don’t worry about the fitbit integration.

Set your slope to an achievable number of workouts per week. Probably not seven, so that you can catch up after the occasional day off!

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@philip is technically correct but I’d rather convince you to just beemind steps or active minutes! It’s a more interesting metric. See our “What To Mind” post. The only disadvantage is that you may not get credit for yoga but I think it’s worth it for having a more interesting graph.

Related feature request: multiple goals/graphs driven off of a single set of datapoints.

Yes, tracking steps is arguably more interesting than the number of days with steps above a threshold, but that doesn’t stop frequency goals from being useful.

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I <3 multiple goals based on single set of datapoints. Many, many of my goals are this way.

I wonder if most of mine could be done by using the same datapoints, but with different aggdays. Hmm…

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Different aggdays, and also a transformation function, like an IFTTT macro applied pre-aggregation.

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