What Activities Count — and What Doesn't
Any intentional exercise with heart rate data counts toward your score. Work shifts and daily movement don't. Here's the full breakdown.
What Activities Count
The short answer: any intentional exercise session where your heart rate is measurable counts. Walking, running, gym, yoga, cycling, gardening, swimming, dancing — it all counts.
The longer answer involves a few rules that exist to keep the competition fair for everyone.
What Counts
Any deliberate exercise session that:
- Has a start and end time (tracked as a workout, not background movement)
- Includes heart rate data (average HR for the session)
- Lasts at least a few minutes
You don’t need to be at a gym. You don’t need special equipment. Any movement that gets your heart rate up — captured by your wearable as a workout — earns Exercise Points.
Examples that count:
- Walking (brisk walk or longer casual walk tracked as a workout)
- Running or jogging
- Cycling — indoor or outdoor
- Swimming
- Gym workouts — weights, machines, cardio equipment
- Yoga and Pilates
- Hiking
- Rowing
- Team sports — football, basketball, tennis, etc.
- Dancing
- Gardening (tracked as a workout)
- Rucking
What Doesn’t Count
Work shifts and occupational activity
If you spend your day on a factory floor, delivering packages, or doing physical labour — that activity is not scored, even if your wearable records it.
This is intentional. Research consistently shows that occupational physical activity (OPA) doesn’t produce the same cardiovascular health benefits as leisure-time exercise — and in some cases correlates with increased health risk. The “Physical Activity Paradox” is well established in the scientific literature.
NestEgg scores intentional exercise only. Your evening walk after work counts. Your 8-hour shift does not.
Background step tracking
Steps tracked passively throughout the day (not as a workout session) don’t earn Exercise Points. Your wearable needs to record a workout with start/end times and heart rate data.
Sessions over 120 minutes (single session cap)
A single workout session is capped at 120 minutes of scored duration. If you log a 3-hour session, only the first 120 minutes count toward your EP.
Additionally, a maximum of 180 minutes of total exercise duration is scored per day across all sessions. Sessions beyond this are logged but don’t add additional EP.
These caps exist to keep the scoring fair across the Flock and prevent outlier sessions from dominating the leaderboard.
Heart Rate Is Required
Every scored workout needs heart rate data. Without it, NestEgg can’t calculate intensity, and intensity is half the EP formula.
If a workout uploads without heart rate data:
- It may score 0 EP or very low EP
- You’ll see a warning on the workout detail screen
- Check your wearable was worn correctly during the session
See HR Data Wrong if your heart rate data is missing or incorrect.
Common Questions
I work a physical job and also exercise in my spare time. Will my work activity interfere? No — NestEgg only scores workouts you deliberately start and stop on your wearable. Background step data from your shift isn’t scored. Your intentional exercise after work counts normally.
I forgot to start my workout on my watch. Does it still count? If no workout was recorded by your wearable, there’s no data to score. Some wearables (Apple Watch, Garmin) can detect and retroactively add workouts — check your wearable app. If there’s no record, you can use Photo-Upload to manually log the session with approximate data.
What’s the minimum workout length? There’s no hard minimum in the app — but very short sessions (under 5 minutes) produce very low EP regardless. The formula rewards duration × intensity, so a 10-minute light walk earns much less than a 30-minute run.
My wearable tracked a sleep session as a workout. Will that score? Sleep tracking sessions typically record very low or zero average heart rate, which produces near-zero EP. If a sleep session does appear in your workout list with unusual data, contact support to have it reviewed.
Does strength training count? Yes — see Strength Training and the ProofShot Requirement for how strength workouts are scored and why a ProofShot matters for them.