Last week, I wrote about fitness guidelines encouraging 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous activities a week. But also noted that that we need to count all incidental movement, not just structured activity.
Counting more activities is a good thing! I say this as someone who does at least three hours a week of structured physical activity that never triggers my fitness watch to count it because it is not of sufficient intensity. Or maybe it’s because I have a dumb smart watch. I have to put all my swims, dance classes, Pilates and yoga manually because my watch doesn’t track any of those things.
Plus I often get near the 7,500 daily step goal Participaction recommends, simply by walking around the pool rather than sitting during long lifeguarding shifts, or when I walk to do errands, but none gets counted unless it is sufficiently intense AND I have turned on the “walk” tracing function.
That said, I used my bike several times for short trips lately, and suddenly my watch is showing that I met or exceeded that 150 minute exercise goal. And if I remember to turn on “walk” to measure my walks to the grocery store or whatever, that gets counted too.
A friend said she got her watch to count the movement involved in snow shovelling by setting it to “cardio”. I just tested that with a short walk at the pool and it looks like I can update to “swim” and still retain the heart rate info. I’ll test that at my next swim practice.
Sadly, using “walk” while lifeguarding doesn’t get me any intensity minutes because I don’t get much heart rate high enough – a good thing in this context. I didn’t even get a fun squiggly GPS map because I was walking indoors.
I wonder what other ways I can trick my dumb smartwatch into counting movement. Maybe jazz class?
Do you have any tricks for tracking your more intense workouts? Do you even worry about having some sort of evidence or external motivation to hit those Participaction goals?