Tracking all­day steps activity

MyFitnessPal encourages clients that provide step­counting to their users to integrate that feature with their users’ MyFitnessPal accounts. The best way to accomplish this is through creating diary entries with type ​steps​ at regular intervals throughout the day.

A key feature for people using MyFitnessPal is the integration of fitness activities into their daily goals. To this end, people can log discrete exercises such as running, bowling, cardio training, and even custom exercises to their diaries. Partner integrations automate this logging, with fitness tracking applications able to log discrete exercises on behalf of their users.

It is often the case that a user’s exercise logging comes from multiple sources: manually logged exercises via the MyFitnessPal website or mobile applications, automatically logged exercises from partner applications, and all­day step tracking applications.

MyFitnessPal aims to ensure that the energy expenditure reflected in a person’s diary is accurate. To that end, we make a strong effort to prevent duplication of activity logging, such as that which might happen when a person wears a step tracker while using a GPS­ enabled running application to log a long­distance run. This is why we require a starting time and duration on both discrete exercise diary entries as well as step entries.