Public health guidelines on physical activity (PA) establish national policy agendas and provide the basis for setting goals and targets. Advances in measurement and resulting new scientific findings lead to evolution of PA guidelines. PA surveillance serves to track compliance with national guidelines, usually expressed as the proportion of the population ‘meeting’ the main quantitative guidelines. The WHO recently completed a process to review and update the global PA guidelines. Changes to the guidelines, such as removal of a 10-min bout criterion, pose challenges for PA surveillance. We review the evolution of PA guidelines and associated surveillance methods and explore implications of the updated guidelines for changes in population surveillance and opportunities for technological approaches to PA to enhance surveillance.