Fitness

Modified on Mon, 25 Jul, 2022 at 2:34 PM

FAQs

Why is my fitness session shorter than the duration I exercised for?

There are a few factors that could influence a discrepancy between the duration of an actual fitness event and what the data shows in the app.

Firstly, the PPG sensor in your wearable that captures your heart rate is influenced by how well your wearable fits. It is important to wear your wearable device properly to ensure it can measure heart rate under optimal conditions. Both wearing the device too tightly or too loosely can negatively affect the quality of the PPG signal.

We recommend the following to improve PPG signal during exercise:

Place the device further up your wrist in order to prevent motion artifacts. This is especially important if you will be doing exercise that involves a lot of wrist and arm movement (for example, walking, cycling, weight-lifting, and rowing).
Warm up before you start your exercise session. This will increase blood flow to the extremities and improve blood flow.
If it is cold, wear warm clothing to avoid poor blood flow. Take care to place tight-fitting sleeve cuffs away from the device so that they do not put pressure on it.
Once the device has started monitoring your heart rate, wait for a few seconds or until the device reports a valid heart rate, before you start exercising. That way, you can be sure that the device is accurately measuring your heart rate.

Secondly, the recording of fitness events is heavily influenced by heart rate. The device picks up an exercise event automatically based on heart rate elevation and movement. This means that if there are any breaks in an exercise event, such as in some forms of stationary strength training or stationary cycling, the accuracy of the start and stop times of a fitness event will be influenced. The heart rate and movement segments within a fitness session must be at least 10 minutes long to be added to the session. Any moderate or vigorous heart rate elevations, whether it was included in the fitness session or not, will still contribute to your overall score.

What is VO2 max?

VO2 max represents the maximum rate at which the body can effectively consume oxygen during exercise. It is widely used as an indicator of cardiorespiratory fitness and useful for setting training goals and measuring training progress.

What is an exercise event?

An exercise event is automatically detected when your heart rate has been elevated to a moderate and / or vigorous intensity for 10 minutes or more. The exercise event can also include light activity, but you need to have entered at least a moderate intensity for the event to be classified as exercise. This is because entering into moderate or vigorous activity, is the only way to improve your fitness level. If you stop exercising or take a break for more than 150 seconds, your exercise event is stopped. This could result in your exercise event not being long enough to display in the app.

How is my fitness score calculated?

Your fitness score is calculated from your profile information (sex, age, height and weight) in combination with the accumulated duration of vigorous and moderate activities across a 7- to 31-day period. You need to collect and upload at least seven (not necessarily consecutive) days’ worth of valid fitness data before you can see your fitness score.

What does my fitness score mean?

Your fitness score is a ranking of your fitness level as compared to individuals of the same age and sex. For example, if a 45-year-old female has a fitness score of 70, she outranks 70% of all 45-year-old females in terms of fitness.

Why don’t I see my fitness score in the app?

You need at least seven days’ worth of data to receive a fitness score, so if you only started wearing your device very recently, or don’t wear it regularly enough, you won’t have enough accumulated data to see your score yet.

My fitness score seems implausible

Users with outlier profile values have scores that are artificially smoothed, which may lead to some adjusted results when compared to others without similarly adjusted results. Examples include:

users younger than 20 and older than 70 years of age
users who do not have many recorded instances of physical activity
users with very high BMI (as calculated from their profile information)

Please refer to the Interpretation of LifeQ Scores section of this document for further information on how the scores are distributed.

I just exercised and uploaded my data, but my fitness score remains unchanged

While other graphs in the app (such as heart rate) are updated directly after data has been uploaded, your fitness score will only be updated a day after your daily activities have been analyzed. Once your score has stabilized, it will only be affected—positively or negatively—by significant lifestyle changes. We recommend ensuring that you are in good health before planning a drastic intervention to improve your fitness score. This may include a visit to your doctor.

Troubleshooting

User reports missing fitness score

Checks:

Does a profile exist for the user?
Is the user’s device connected to their profile?
Was the user’s profile created less than a week ago?
- If the user’s profile was created less than a week ago, they won’t have enough data to compile a score with yet, and will have to keep wearing their device until at least seven days’ worth of data has been collected. Due to this requirement, users should expect to see a score on approximately the eighth day of data collection.
Are there any profile inputs missing?
- If a user’s profile lacks any of the necessary inputs (age, sex, height, weight, resting heart rate or default resting heart rate) their score won’t be calculated.

User reports a perceived inaccurate fitness score

Checks:

Does the user’s profile contain any outlier values?
- Values are considered to be outliers when:

*BMI is the ratio of an individual’s height to their weight and is calculated as “[weight in kg] / [height in meters]2. For example, a person who is 1.80 m tall and weighs 95 kg would have a BMI of [95] / [1.8]2 = 29.3.