Count.It Exercise Activities Deconstructed

Your office has decided to run a wellness challenge, and any valid exercise counts towards your points in the challenge. (Imagine!) You decide to go to the gym with your work bff, and lift some weights, stretch, and maybe do some sit-ups, pull-ups, dips, etc.

As it happens, your work/out buddy is an iPhone user, and you love your Android phone. In the land of activity logging, here’s where things can get a bit confusing. Post-workout, your friend decides to log the workout in Apple Health as “Functional Strength Training.” Google Fit gives you the option of “Strength Training,” but you decide to go with “Weight Lifting” instead. Same activities, very different logs.

Ho hum, you say, not a big deal. Ok, here’s another: After the workout, you decide to go kayaking together. You will log that in your Google Fit as “kayaking,” while she will not find that option, and may ultimately describe it as “Water Sports.” 😳 Kayaking does not exist in the Apple Universe.

Here’s the rub: In the land of Big Tech, there is no standard naming convention for exercises, or even a standard for what activities ARE exercises.

And so it goes: Bowling exists for iPhone users, but not so much for Google Fit loyalists. You can hunt, fish, and play pickleball with your iPhone, but your Google Fit will remain silent on these subjects. Google will cheer you on for kettlebell workouts, kick-scootering to work, or paragliding, while your iPhone will look the other way.

This is not usually a problem for those who use their fitness trackers entirely for themselves, but when people begin sharing their activity data in group wellness challenges, the lack of naming standards, and/or the lack of agreement on what counts as exercise, can become problematic.

This would be a problem for Count.It, except that WE SOLVED IT! Hello master taxonomy of exercise activities. In short, we’ve mashed-up the worlds of Google Fit and Apple Health to create a single standard for exercise activities.

Yes, this is geeky, but it’s also very handy. And, in the interest of helping others with a similar problem, we’ve decided to publish our list for the benefit of the entire activity-logging world. With out further ado, we give you the Standard Count.It Exercise List, with mappings to both the Apple Health (via Apple’s Healthkti API, the HKWorkoutActivityType) and Google Fit (via Google’s Android SKD Fit API, FitnessActivities.)

We welcome any and all feedback, questions, or contributions to the list.