In December 2021 I had one question, what insights could I gain from 6 months of my fitness and health data? All I needed to do was to find a way to track everything from steps taken to heart rate to even how long I spend at the gym. Luckily, I just needed one device to track all of these metrics and that was an Apple Watch.
The Apple Watch stores your health data in a default app on the iPhone called Health. Unfortunately, when trying to export the file, its exported in .xml format and I really couldn't do anything with that. So I found an app on the Apple Store called Health Export that cost me $2 but allowed me to export the data stored on my iPhone to .csv. After I did that, I stored them locally on my pc.
Dang Dirty Data
Most of the data came pretty clean and ready for Tableau EXCEPT my date column. My dates came out like this,
Start Time | End Time |
12-14-2021 12:35 PM | 12-14-2021 01:03 PM |
I had this ambition to use the times and analyze hot zones when I would work out. Funnily enough, that didn't work out because of how Tableau handles times and links them to dates. So I just decided to isolate the dates. I did this by selecting each column individually and doing Text to Columns to consolidate the values. This is what I ended up with.
Date | Start Time |
12-14-2021 | 12:35 PM |
I only needed the dates, so I could scrap the other columns related to this. The duration column was in seconds so I converted it to minutes for a little ease of understanding. Everything else was ready to import to Tableau!
The first thing I did after uploading to Tableau was pivot all the activities and Date(Month) by Duration(Minutes).
This dashboard shows all the activities I partook in, in the last 6 months. The only activities I really cared about were Powerlifting and Walking because those were the ones I did every day.
Once I figured that out, I wanted to see the sum and average amount of time (in minutes) I spent Powerlifting and Walking. This dashboard denotes my results.
The Results
Full Analysis Found Here!
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/stephen.tran1023/viz/6MonthFitnessData/6MonthHealthandFitness
The Breakdown
From January to May, I averaged 2600 minutes/month just from Powerlifting alone, that's 43 hours/month! This number makes sense to me because I can easily spend 2-3 hours a day at the gym. If you take a look at the average minutes each month you can see it was around 90 minutes in January and jumps to 130 minutes in February. One explanation for this was that I was preparing for a meet in April so I had to step things up training wise. You can see a taper down going into April because I was focusing on my strength peaking for the actual meet itself, so I was doing less reps, higher weight and that would decrease my time in the gym.
Here's a WoW analysis if you are curious.
We can see the days I spend the most time powerlifting are Monday's, Wednesday's, and Friday's. This makes sense because these tend to be the days where I am both Squatting and Benching, therefore, it takes me longer to finish my workouts.
THIS is the most interesting graph I have in this entire analysis in my opinion. If you only take a way one graph from this analysis I want you to think about this one.
Not known to me, my Apple Watch was actually storing the temperature outside on a daily basis. When I was scrubbing through all the data I could pull, I noticed temperature. The question I had to ask myself was, how could this be useful? I have read a few papers on how temperature affects calorie burn so I decided to pivot them together. The results are pretty astonishing. You can see as the temperature raises, so does the amount of calories burned. You can see there's a direct correlation between temperature and calories burned at least when it comes to my personal anatomy and the weather in the Bay Area of California.
Another analysis I wanted to do was see how my heart rate was affected over the duration of my workouts. What I found was that it definitely was all over the place. We see higher spikes towards the beginning of my sessions but that makes sense because a lot of my training is frontloaded with more difficult and heavier weights to manage. I try to keep my intensity high even with back down sets and even with accessory movements (gotta focus on isolation movements, that's how we get the big back and biceps!).
Closing
I definitely want to revisit this analysis once I reach a year of stored personal data. I learned quite a bit from this and i'm excited to see what my data looks like after a year. I don't expect to see much of a change since my habits when it comes to training hasn't changed but I guess we'll see!
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