Episode 57: My Workout Tech

Transcript

i thought i'd go through the apps and technology that i use from a fitness and workout standpoint
first of all everything well i i try to put everything i can i'll talk about that in a
minute but i can't get everything up there but if you're curious the kind of data that i'm
collecting on my own workouts um i do post all of that and i try to make it in a format that
is easy to navigate and stuff like that it's kind of an just just kind of a little personal
web page kind of thing i will link to it in the in the notes when i got when i originally was
weightlifting and working out back as a teenager i didn't track anything i you know i think it was
less common to track everything for one thing phones like smartphones weren't a thing yet and
there was a lot less to remember and think about in life i mean i was younger there was less to be on
my mind so it was relatively easy to go to the gym and remember you know my maybe 10 to 15 core
exercises that i did and just remember the weights that i was at uh that wasn't difficult at the time
and also i just i you know i was just getting started i didn't you know the people i was going
with weren't tracking anything so it just wasn't you know kind of a natural thing when i came back
into working out and weightlifting i started with just a pen and paper and i would just write down
you know the the sets the weights the reps all that kind of stuff the basic stuff and then any notes
that i wanted to remember for the next time and it worked fine but it was another thing to carry
around and all that kind of stuff and obviously there's a line right you don't want to go into
the gym and just sit on your phone and and just be you don't want the technology to get in the way
however if you use the technology well it can be a real benefit as long as it's not something that
then distracts you so anyway i use a few things i try to keep it kind of minimal but this is a big
piece of my life so i i do try to i have found some tools that really work for me so i'll start with
the core of it all or what to me is the core of it all if i had to pick just one thing i would
probably choose this for my actual weightlifting my actual workouts i use an app called strong
and i'll link to all this stuff in the notes i use an app called strong i do pay the subscription
on this this is a it has like a yearly cost i forget exactly how much it is i want to say it's
like 30 bucks or 50 bucks i don't remember but it's a yearly cost and i just pay for the year
it has a big bank of exercises and you can add your own if there's things that you know aren't in
there and it just lets you track your weights your your reps all that kind of stuff and it keeps track
of certain things like like personal records personal bests that kind of stuff as you go
it gives you some stats but i don't really use it for the stats they really aren't that
in depth or great it kind of shows you some trend lines but they're kind of useless to me
it's more about just the core tracking and the core if i then want to go back to an exercise
sometime later i want to go dig through notebooks to try to find it the other thing it has is a data
export where you can export all your day as a csv it's not the best csv in the world but it was good
enough where i can export it and use it to feed again the the sort of website that i keep with all
this information so that's the core workout app now after that it works the way that i think about
my workouts i should mention that it does have support for things like supersets and warm-up
sets and things like that it just works the way that my brain sort of thinks about working out it's
not perfect but it's like 95 of the way there and so that's been a very good app for me now the next
piece is the apple watch and i didn't have it at first but maybe you know a bunch of years ago i did get
one and i like it a it links up with the strong app and it does so pretty well so as you're working out
you know if you don't have an apple watch the basically the the watch it tracks sort of three
main stats it tracks sort of your quote-unquote what they call the move energy but the idea is it's
trying to separate out the calories that you burn throughout the day just by existing versus the
calories that are actually from actively doing something whether that's moving around walking
working out going for a run like whatever so the strong app links up with the watch and it does its
best and the watch then is able to count your workouts as active energy which i find to be useful
now the apple watch is far if you're using an apple watch and thinking that the numbers are accurate
you're probably you're probably going down a bad road they are not it's all an estimate and it's all
based on you know technology that's you know maybe it's 80 accurate something like that but 20 when
you're talking about calories burned thousands of calories burned in a day week month 80 isn't all
that great but whatever what i like it for is not knowing the exact number of calories i spent or
whatever on a workout what i like to see is the relation to other ones so what i find it very useful
for is if let's say on a monday you close all your rings and it tells you that you burned whatever 800
active calories that day then the next day you don't close your rings and it says you only burned
600 calories in the day or whatever it gives you some indication that you were more active on monday
than tuesday and i do find that to be useful i do find it to be useful to know at the end because
on mondays you get kind of a summary where it's like here's how many times you beat whatever metrics
you set for yourself and here's what your active calories looked like and i find it really useful
to be able to say like oh monday i did real well tuesday wednesday weren't you know i didn't quite hit
my marks wednesday thursday i did i did well oh that i remember that day i went for a run or that day i did
a swim or whatever like it gives you some indication that you can track over time of what
what what you've been doing in relation to other days i don't in other words i don't care about the
actual numbers it presents i care more about is the bar higher or lower than the day before that's sort
of how i think about it the other thing i like about the apple watch is that while strong is great
for tracking workouts the apple watch is pretty good for tracking everything else so if you go for
a walk if you swim if you run if you bicycle any of that kind of stuff is great for um on the apple
watch it will track it give you some idea of the calories and there's a whole bunch of data there that
i'll talk about in a second which i also have found a mechanism by which you can export that
and i again i feed it into into this website that i keep for like all my fitness data so i've got
strong that i can export workout data uh like weightlifting data i've got apple watch that can
export basically everything else data the third piece in sort of my trio my main trio is weight tracking
um like body weight tracking i use an app called happy scale now i bought this app like the lifetime
whatever you know early adopter membership or something way back when i think it had just come
out not long before today i'm not sure how it is it is a paid app you can use parts of it for free
and other parts that are paid i'm not sure if it's a subscription model these days or if you can still
do a one-time purchase for a lifetime or what but as far as weight tracking goes i really like this app
you can set different goals you know are you trying to gain weight lose weight maintain weight do you want
to maintain weight within what range and then it gives you a bunch of options for tracking your weight
are you and what i like to use is what is my moving average weight right so i don't care if i weigh in
one day and i'm 180 and the next day i'm 181 and the next day i'm 179 i don't tell myself oh you lost
two pounds or you lost a pound or you gained a pound or whatever i want to see when you when you
mathematically smooth all that out is my trend going up or down right or staying the same and and that's
what this app does really well plus the visuals are nice the interface is nice and it also integrates
all of these things integrate with the core um apple health and apple fitness in the background
so all this data works together like i'll enter my weight actually into strong my body weight and then
that feeds back into i forget if it's apple health or apple fitness i think it's apple health
and then that feeds happy scale so happy scale gets the updates that i put into strong
and then i can see the visualizations and the tracking from from happy scale and once again
it has a data export feature so i'm able to export it and put it up on this site that i like to put all
my information together on so that's my trio my main trio is the strong app apple watch
and happy scale now couple kind of ancillary things or things that are more on the fringe
as i mentioned to get the data out of apple health is not easy but i did find an app that does this
pretty well so if you're trying to and again most people probably even aren't even trying to do this
but for me pulling the data out is just as important as getting the data in
so i found an app called auto export which can do a whole bunch of stuff
one of which is to export all the health data so i'm able to pull the health data out and then run
some stuff on it in order to massage it into a format that i like so that's an ancillary piece
that i use um another ancillary piece so anyway i the the another ancillary piece i'll talk about in
a second but again my use case here is i want to put all my data in then i want to be able to pull
it all out and massage it into a way that i like it and then i try to post everything up on my web
on this website so and then that's a way that i kind of track things over time and see you know just
see years of progress and i can also show it to other people too if they're ever interested in
seeing like oh what workouts are you doing right now that kind of stuff so i do all of that um the
pieces that i would like and again there'll be a link to that website in the notes there's a couple
things i would like to expand upon on the site one piece is i'd really like to start and this is one
thing i just i haven't built this yet but i want to show summary data so i'd like people to say like
oh you know pick a year like 2024 what was your most common like what did you what was the lift you
did the most times um how many times did you run that year how many times did you go you know how
many times did you lift weights that year like just some summary data you know some some averages
stuff like that so i can see that i just haven't spent the time to build that yet
the other piece that i really like up on that site is my nutrition data now there's two barriers to
this one i tried tracking my nutrition data for a while and i just found it really tedious so it's
like a personal thing like i just haven't found the motivation i suppose to really see that through
i'm able to increase and decrease and bulk and cut really without having to track it at such a
tedious level i've just never needed to do that i have found ways to do it in other ways i suppose
so it didn't really stick for me but the other reason but i was doing it and the reason i was doing
tracking for a while and i think i tracked for a good four or five months really for the first time
ever what i wanted to do with it was pull all that data out and get it onto this site so you could see
like oh i worked out like this this day i did a run this day i did a swim this day and here's my
nutrition for the day that's what i wanted on the site i was using a app called macro factor which i've
talked about in this show before i really liked it it was pretty good it had an export feature for the
data but when i went to export the data it only gave me summary data it would say oh you had this
many calories this much protein this much fat this many carbs i wanted to see the actual foods i ate
in that export but it didn't exist in that export and i i reached out to the developer and they told
me oh due to like their partnerships with these food companies or whatever or the database companies
that do the food they're not allowed to export that data which was a bummer to me so i don't know
i might try some other app for this and see if they're able to export the actual food data that's
what's more interesting to me i don't really care about posting oh i you know had 200 grams of protein
or whatever i wanted to be able to show 200 grams of protein and here's where it came from so that
people asked me for like oh what do you eat on a daily basis i could show them that was much more
interesting to me so once the at once i found out the app couldn't export what i wanted it to
and it was tedious to begin with it just kind of fell off for me so that's what happened with that
but that is a thing i would still love to do on the site so if anybody knows of a macro tracking a
nutrition tracking app that does do exports of the individual like foods and meals you eat
i'd love to hear about that love to take a look at that but anyway that's sort of my suite of things
i'll have links to all this in the notes again i kind of have this trio of strong app happy scale
and my apple watch that's my core and then i have a couple of other things that kind of sit around it
and most of that stuff though is really just so that i can then pull the information out so hope
this was useful to someone if you're looking for one for an app that does one of these things or
whatever i recommend these piece these things it's this trio has worked very well for me over
time i've been using it for i don't know five six years and i don't find a lot of shortcomings with
it it does what i need it to do it stays out of the way and it's a benefit so give it a whirl
hope that's uh helpful to somebody
you