Working Out and Data
21st century: Can’t live with offline
I spend an awful about of time in front of my computer, and to balance that I need regular exercise. And I love exercise. But I’ve realised that exercise is only fun when you have other people to work out with. Last year I and some of my school friends got together and made a spreadsheet of our workout records. This was extremely fun. We had categories ranging from Cycling, and Yoga to Body Weight. The spreadsheet evolved and became this huge mish-mash of formulae and data. It was amazing. Not only did the competition promote us, but looking at other’s records gave us a benchmark to beat.
Unfortunately, it didn’t last very long. After 5 months of maintaining the spreadsheet we started fighting over which records were genuine and which records were bogus. I didn’t really care that much as long as I could see my records there, but we still ended up abandoning the sheet. And with that I started working out less. It just wasn’t that fun anymore.
I know, this sounds weird. Who cares if you’re not recording everything you exercise. But I guess /r/dataisbeautiful was spoiled me. So I’ve decided to take a different approach of recording exercise data: In basic CSV files. Every time I work out, I’ll append a line to the respective CSV file. Then I’ll set up scripts to parse the files and give me stats about my workout routine. notabhay will also be joining me, so I’ll set up a comparison chart too.
I think I’ll also make a “Workout” page on my website with the stats too, once I have enough data. And I’ll also share all the scripts on github/gitlabs.
Copyright © 2018, 2023 Vikriti D’Vita
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