Workouts in 2014

After my 2014 Year in Review blog post, I wanted to dive a little deeper into my workout habits. How often did I go last year, and how could I graph that?

Edward suggested something like the GitHub contribution graph, which I liked. After some poking around, I found this block by the incredible Mike Bostock which shows how to create a calendar view (like a GitHub contribution graph) for arbitrary data.

Here are my workout days in 2014. I tried to stick to a 3-day-a-week schedule. Each week is displayed top-to-bottom, so the second column is January 5-11, the third column is January 12-18, etc.

You can see that my schedule is fairly regular in January-March, then falls down, then becomes regular again in September. On October 30 I switched to the Madcow 5x5 program, which provides a spreadsheet of each day’s workout. It was inspiring to see what I could achieve in three weeks if I just kept going.

I recommend writing down where you could be in a few weeks if you follow your current program - maybe it’s squatting 285, or running half a mile more than you can right now. Seeing it written down encouraged me to go to the gym even if I didn’t want to, because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t hit that new PR in one week.