It's Friday. I thought I'd monkey with my walking data a little more now that I have some more data points. I am even working on an auto-updating graph that will track my steps on this site. In looking at the previous post I'm of the minset that the daily step number may not be the best for tracking long-term progress.
The typical periodicity for life seems to be the week. We ask people what they're doing each week, or how their week was. We plan work and vacations on a weekly basis. Weeks reset after a weekend. Most workouts, fitness plans, diets, etc. are based on weeks. It's the 21-day (3 week) Fix. Thus, it makes sense from a social-psychological perspective to look at weekly performance. Daily, is good to make sure you're hitting targets each day, but as a measure of progress the daily satisfaction gets lost in life. That said the measure should also be something that can be conceptualized on a daily basis. Also, like drug testing, I want a measure of my fitness level as a habit, not just spikes on a dense plot. The "daily average steps per week" seems to be a good fit for this
So here it is. My average daily steps per calendar week for 2016. This charting allows me to correlate activity per time of year, baseline for seasons, see anomalies (i.e. my San Diego conference in January) and look to see if I can manage to progress through the busy-ness of life. It's rather satisfying. It would be nice to generate more plots/overlays correlating with weight, weight lifting, diet, types of exercise and active activities. This is a good start. Looking at this I can already make a first goal of increasing my average weekly step count to be consistently above 10k steps, maybe even to push myself to continuously up the average.
Again, this is satisfying and fun for a data-head like me. I'm sure many more annotations and iterations will come.
