My physical activity story
Two years ago, I bought a Garmin Watch, the Venu. I have been wearing it every day and have recorded most of my activities. After two years I thought ‘let’s have a look at all that data collected’. Below a summary of my physical activities performed between May 2020 and April 2022.
I have been active 338 hours and 14 minutes over the last 2 years, which is about 2% of my waking hours. This may not sound much, but if you, like me, worked full-time and take an hour a day off to cook and eat, I have been active 46% of my free time!
As a Dutch person living in Australia, I try to stay true to my culture and ride my bike, not as often as I’d would like though. Nevertheless, in the past 2 years I cycled the distance from Perth to Karattha. Furthermore, I ran from Perth to Margaret River and walked to Rottnest Island and back. My strength training has been challenging with the COVID19 lockdowns and restrictions, but I have successfully transferred to our home gym. The number of repetitions and sets are most likely an under representation as I don't always correctly measure these.
Given I collected 8 months of data in 2020, 12 months in 2021 and 4 months in 2022, I look at the number of activities performed proportionally. Year 2020 and 2021 look pretty similar, it seems that I recently have made some changes to my routine: I reduced cycling activities and increased yoga and walking activities. This is likely because I cycled to work a lot and I work from home now. I may need to reintroduce cycling in a more recreational way. Running activities were significantly lower in 2021, but I seem to have taken it up again his year. Across the two years, I seem to be most habitual in the number of strength training; it is what I do most often (~40%-50% of my workouts). I have been doing strength training since I was 18 and I don’t think I will ever stop!
Overall, I did nine different activities, the ‘other’ category was rowing in 2021 and swimming in 2022. I definitely spent more time doing Yoga this year, it is a activity I started to enjoy more and more.
In 2021, I see a small reduction in time spent exercising, not much though! Most likely because of the adaptations needed in my work and personal life because of the COVID19. Change in environment and routines do have an effect on established exercise habits. But not to worry, I seem to have settled in again this year.
I really expected to see seasonal changes but they are not really there. Only a couple of hours less during autumn, nothing significant. Looking at hours per month (below), there is no real pattern. I seem to vary between 7 hours (2 times a week) and 24 hours (6 times a week) of exercise per month.
The Australian guidelines recommend to be physical active for 2.5 to 5 hours of moderate intensity physical activity or 1.25 to 2.5 hours of vigorous intensity physical activity. I can easily say that I am physically active enough. On average, I complete 3 hours and 20 min of physical activity per week, 75% of which is moderate to high intensity.
For me, being active is very habitual and I really enjoy doing it. Not to say that it is always easy to start! There are times where I feel no motivation but I still ‘make’ myself. What helps for me is to have all the facilities in place to make working out easy, plan ahead and prepare, tell somebody you are exercising today or tomorrow morning and remember how you will feel during/afterwards. Most important is to keep the habit going, even if I really feel off, tired or down, I still try. Even if it is for 10 min in the gym when I only do one bicep curl and lay 5 minutes on the mat doing nothing, or I walk up and down the street. I won’t be hard on myself for not doing enough, I will be proud for putting on the clothes and for getting outside.
I enjoy data science and being active, my Garmin is a perfect marriage between these two. Give a shout if you’d like your data presented like this.
Stay active, have fun and be awesome!
