Can Analytics Make you Stronger?
Recently I have been playing around with Power BI which is an analytics service provided by Microsoft. By no means am I an expert in analytics or the use of Power BI, but I have learned a decent amount over the last couple of months and I thought I would share some of my insights.
As many of you may know I am an avid fitness junkie and to not bore myself to death I chose to use Power BI in combination with my workout data from my fitness app “Repcount”. Repcount allows me to track all of my workouts including exercises, sets, reps, rest intervals, etc. and it also provides the functionality of exporting that information to Excel.
I dropped in my workout data and started trying to piece together some visualizations that could help me make more progress in the gym. Let’s face it, who doesn’t want to be bigger and stronger! :)
The dashboards below are ultimately what I came up with after some tweaking and a good amount of trial and error. The first dashboard pictured below is an overall summary of my workout history and includes my top 10 most performed exercises, how much I hit each body part, and some other useful/fun information over the years (earliest data from 2015).
The 2nd dashboard below takes a little bit of a deeper dive on my best stats for each individual exercise. I am able to use the filter in the top of the dashboard to switch between exercises and see my max weight lifted and how many times I performed it. In the screenshot below you can see that I chose “Bench Press” as the exercise and I can see that the most I eve did was 250lbs once which was completed on 2/7/2016. The bar chart at the bottom of the dashboard also points out my max weight lifted over the years. Notice since my all time high in 2016 that I have not replicated the same performance. I’m going to say that this is due to injuries :)
In addition to this I can keep this updated at all times. Power BI allows you to create a data gateway which creates a connection between your dashboard and the source file. I found out that this is just fancy lingo for you can keep your visuals updated automatically! All I have to do is download my data file from the Repcount app and overwrite the previous version on my computer and Power BI will automatically refresh my dashboard!
This was a very simple exercise, but I think that there are a few key things I can determine from the data above:
- Based on the pie chart in the first dashboard above, it is clear that I spend more time exercising my upper body rather than my lower body. A harsh reality check, but nonetheless an important piece of information I may never have realized before.
- After 2016 the amount of weight I was lifting started to decline. I think this was mainly due to nagging injuries. However, I vividly remember giving myself an ego check during that time and realizing that lifting as heavy as possible wasn’t always the best idea. Therefore, I lowered the weight on most exercises and started focusing more on form and truly getting better at each movement.
- My Power BI skills can still use a lot of improvement :)
All in all this is just scratching the surface of what you can accomplish with a tool like Power BI. It really does make it easier to understand data and information since it can easily be put into a visual format that is more pleasing to the eye.
You may not be a fitness junkie, but perhaps you could apply this to your job, finances, budgeting, sales, etc. There are an endless amount of possibilities and hopefully me taking a stab at it here can spark an idea for you or at least give you a little more insight into what analytics and visualizations can be used for.
If you have any questions or comments I’d be more than happy to hear them! Thanks for reading!