An Apple(Health) a Day

… keeps the doctor away. My fitness tracking setup using cool (and sometimes unnecessary) technology, inspired by this blog post.

Hardware

Software

Apple Health – track health trends and aggregate data from all sources
Strong – track workouts
Withings – collect data from smart scale and visualize health trends from Apple Health
Hidrate – collect water intake data from my smart water bottle
Productive App – my go-to habit tracker

Exercise – Workouts and Activity

My Apple Watch is the main source of exercise data. I use it in conjunction with the Strong app to manually record my workouts, and the Withings app to visualize trends (which I believe aggregates my data better than the stock Apple Health app). My goal here is to stay regular with my physical activity and slowly increase my strength in the gym. I try not to obsess too much over numbers from a particular day; the overall trend is more important to me.

Workout Tracking

I’ve created three templates (for free) on the Strong app, corresponding to each set of muscle groups I exercise – chest & triceps, back & biceps, and legs & shoulders. When I start a workout on my phone, it automatically opens the app on my Apple Watch. I manually enter the weights, sets, and reps after each exercise (most of it is pre-filled in the template), though. Once I’m done with my workout, the Watch automatically syncs with my phone. After each workout, you have the option to update the template with the most recent workout, which is really handy to have a benchmark when you exercise the same muscle group next time. All good, apart from the few times the app lags and I’m impatiently waiting for it before starting my next set.

Templates for each muscle group

Quick workout statistics

Example template

Activity

Most of this is on autopilot. My Watch automatically gathers data throughout the day (and night), notably – number of steps taken, amount of calories burned, average heart rate, walking distance, and cardiovascular fitness. I prefer looking at the visualizations on the Withings web app.

Simple and clean visualizations on the Withings web app

To keep myself motivated, I compete with my friends using the Apple Fitness platform. Each day, you can earn upto 600 points, awarded based on calories burned, exercise minutes, and standing hours. At the end of the week, the person with higher points wins. This has pushed me to be regular with my routine on many days I feel lazy. However, I’ll have to concede – sometimes I move my arm around while lounging just to get a few extra points in.

An ongoing competition – always keeps me on my toes

Three categories you get points from

Sleep Tracking

As before, I use my Watch to track my sleep, and use the Withings app to visualize the data. The app aggregates the detailed sleep data into a single “Sleep Score”, which I really like – I can get a good idea about my sleeping habits at a glance without having to analyze the data too much. I mainly track weekly averages for my weekday/weekend bed time, sleep duration, and Sleep Score. While I’d ideally want good sleep every day, I’m content with good weekly averages – few ups and downs throughout the week are unavoidable (especially with grad school deadlines and/or Friday night parties).

Weekly sleep aggregates

Daily sleep score – definitely needs some work here

Water Intake

This is something I have been trying to improve for the longest time – I’ve had acne problems for many years and my protein intake has been high since I’ve started to work out. The HidrateSpark Pro was my solution. Unnecessary and excessive technology like this is my weakness, I admit. The smart bottle tracks your water intake and lights up every once in a while to remind you to drink water. Exciting at first, but a gimmick you get used to and end up ignoring. However, I love collecting as much data as possible, and sometimes I drink water just to see that graph move – it gets the job done.

The app syncs with the bottle every time I drink from it

Water intake target for the day

Weight and Body Composition

I picked up the Body+ smart scale recently and it has turned out more useful than I thought. The technology is really cool. It calculates your body fat percentage by using something known as “bioelectrical impedance analysis”, which is basically sending a tiny electric current through your body. It also automatically computes your weight, BMI, muscle mass and bone mass.

From the research I did, it seems like it’s not the most accurate measurements, which is a limitation of the technology it uses, but I focus more on the trends instead.