How did you push yourself over time?

I mentioned many time the best rolling plots are my favorite feature of ConnectStats. After adding a new ability to visually see when you reached specific best, I have now a first version of a feature I have been planning to do for a while now: time analysis of specific slice of your best achievement.

So today, I submitted to Apple for release a first version of this feature in ConnectStats 6.1. The best rolling curve shows you what best power, heart rate or pace you reached for a given time or distance. You could previously see what that curve looked like for a month or year. Now you can see how specific point evolved over time.

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Similar Summary Stats, Different effort…

While I still need to figure out how to use the new power field from Stryd, Running Power is already a useful other way to compare the type of effort of different activities. Since I got the new pod, I have been motivated to go out run more, and looking at the last few weeks, I realised that a few runs had interestingly some similar headline stats but very different feel. So I decided to see how ConnectStats displayed the differences.

In the summary, you can see the first two have very similar heart rate average, but very different pace, while the run in Shanghai has similar pace as the first one, but higher heart rate. The run in the new territories run (Hong Kong) is also interesting to compare to the Putney run (Richmond Park). Let’s dive in.

Comparing Activities in ConnectStats

You can easily compare two activities in ConnectStats by sliding the activities in the list and selecting mark. The activity will then shows in the background of the new one you look at.

A mark will be displayed to remind you which activity is the “compare” activity.

Same Heart Rate, Different Pace

The first two run to compare have an average of 176 and 175 HR respectively but a pace of 4:50 and 5:30. You can of course just look at the pace plot on top of each other, but it’s a bit messy

Note that the map will show you both activities, useful when they are on the same location, but less when they are quite different route, as here. The pace graph clearly shows that for large part of the run the pace was faster, but not very insightful. A much better way to compare the effort is to look at the best rolling plots.

You can see that it was definitely a higher power effort, but the pace shows that the slower run had more constant pace, flatter curve. The heart rate plot shows that the max effort (left part of the curve) was similar, but the tail was lower (steeper curve on the right for the faster curve). Overall a less consistent effort, but where I pushed more at time and resulted in the same average heart rate but very different pace. The power curve interestingly shows quite a higher effort. These were two different runs, the slower one was a commute run, with a backpack and on city streets with more stop and go at light. It was also early morning, so typically not when I do my best performances…

Same Pace, Different Heart Rate

We can also compare that same activity to another run a week ago with same pace (4:49 and 4:50) but higher heart rate (181 and 176 respectively).

You can see the activity being compared to (lighter colour) has clearly higher heart rate effort through out. One interesting observation is that the lower heart rate run has steeper start, which means there were a few period where I pushed rather than a continuous effort .The pace on the other hand has a quite a different profile between the two runs

The lower heart rate run has a much steeper shape, while the other one has a quite flat profile, meaning a more constant effort.

Now for the new measure of power, again interestingly the raw graph comparison is quite useless. Hard to really see much in the difference of the effort.

 But the best rolling graph again shows a very interesting story, if somewhat consistent with the other. While the effort was about the same, the higher graph shows a much more varied effort: more power on shorter time period, but converge at the end for the overall time.

The higher heart rate was just a run where I tried to push much more through out and consistently. Quite interesting that it resulted in the higher heart rate…

If you wonder why the little bump around 5min, me too! this is an annoying little bug or quirk which I haven’t yet figured out!

Time ahead

A last graph that maybe of interest, even though in this specific case, maybe less interesting in this specific case, but it shows you the time ahead (or behind) from the compared activity. The big straight drop are pauses. So you can see that I took quite a few pauses in the lower heart rate run, and it had period where I was catching up (upward slopping) and period where I was getting behind (downward slopping). On the map, the area where I am ahead are blue, and then goes to red when I am behind. Which makes it easy to see where you are behind or ahead, especially when the run is at the same place (not the case here).

Hope you found this interesting. Happy Training.

 

Flyover maps in ConnectStats 2.5

Screen Shot 2015-10-31 at 09.36.24I recently saw an article on iOS development, explaining the maps features available to developers. I had never realised it was possible to enable in an app the 3d views you see in the apple Map app. A little bit of fiddling later and you can now see your course in gorgeous 3d views if you have an iPhone that supports it and your city is covered by the feature.

I haven’t really yet figured out how it can help you with training or analysing your data better, but it looks great and is a pretty neat way to relive some of your runs or rides, so here it is available in connectstats 2.5 (under review by apple at the time of this writing)

How to

Screen Shot 2015-10-31 at 09.43.15To enable it, simply go to the detail page, switch to the satellite view and tap anywhere on the map, it will then show you the closest point on your course in 3d. You can then use the normal controls of the map to zoom or move around.

Small Gallery

You can see here a few samples from recent runs. Enjoy!

 

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Year to date or Month to date statistics

Version 2.1 of ConnectStats introduces the ability to see year to date or month to date statistics. The yearly cumulative graph was already giving a good idea of how well you were doing this year versus the last, but now you can see the full stats you reached at the same point of last year.

Below for example you can see that in 2015, so far I ran 758km, while on the full year of 2014 I ran 1356km. If you press on the button All, you get to the YTD screen, that shows that in 2014 at the same point in the year as today (August), I had run 913km.

IMG_1664 IMG_1665

In the monthly view, the graph is slightly different, the full month bar is shown, but the blue shows how much for each month was reached at the same point in the month, here around august 15, or about half way through the month.

 

IMG_1666 IMG_1667

Best Rolling Graphs over Time

ConnectStats can now maintain best rolling graph over time. I find it quite interesting to see how one month compare to the other. You access the feature by going to the statistics screen and it’s the graph at the bottom of the summary page.

You can also find information about best rolling plots for an activity here and how to interpret them here

Initial Computation

Computing these graphs can be quite expensive. Every time you do a download, ConnectStats will process a few activities. It requires the full activity details, so only the activities for which you will have looked at the detail screen will be used.

You can force to recalculate older activities by going to the settings, profiles, and select Compute Best for more old Activities. This processes quite a few existing activities. Each time to press it, it will look for activities not already processed.

Interpreting the graphs

Heart Rate

This is the graph showing the best Heart Rate I achieved for any given period of time.
iOS_Simulator_Screen_Shot_8_Aug_2015_09_34_03The arrow 1 below shows the graph for July. You can see here that it was a month for which the best of the year was achieved except for the area pointed out by the arrow 2. The arrow 3 potints to the yellow graph showing that the last year (2014) was not as good as this year, I definitely pushed myself more this year, especially in july, when I completed a half marathon…

If you tap once on the graph it will rotate through the last few months, to show you how you performed then.

 

 

Pace or speed

This is the graph with the best speed or pace I achieve for a given distance. Not the heart rate is for time, not distance as I think it makes more sense.

iOS_Simulator_Screen_Shot_8_Aug_2015_09_34_15
If you pan to the left on the graph it will switch to the best pace or speed. Arrow 1 here shows you that the best speed for the year on most distances was achieved in july. Note that for pace a graph lower is better, but for speed higher is better. Again, if you tap on the graph, it will rotate through the last few months.

 

 

 

ConnectStats version 2.0

ConnectStats 2.0 brings quite a few exciting new features. The major change is that now ConnectStats will start maintaining some measures over time, while until now it really only acted as a cache for the data collected on either Strava or Garmin.

This opens the door to a lot of new features. So I upgraded the version and I celebrated by redesigning the icon…

BestHRThe first data I was really interested in looking at over time, was how the best rolling heart rate graph compared from month to month and year to year. Similar to the best pace. These graphs are not necessarily very common to see,  but I find they are a fascinating way to see how I am performing on a run or over the month. I will dedicate a post soon to these. Some snapshots here

BestPace

CalendarAllThe other feature is an improved calendar view. It now has more control to only show some activities, and a new visual circle to indicate how much each day fared compared to the maximum for the month. The best day is highlighted with by a darker color in the circle.

 

CalendarRun

Next version of ConnectStats

I have pushed ConnectStats 1.23 to the App Store.

Connectivity upgrades

ConnectStats 1.23 uses withings latest authorisation service. Hopefully it will be more robust going forward. The login relies on a webpage login and a page where you need to explicitly grant access to ConnectStats.

The workflow around Strava log in has also been improved. There is now a button in the Services page to force and test a login to Strava. Also a silly bug that was sometimes complaining about Garmin when trying to access Strava has been fixed.

ConnectStats 1.23 also fixes an issue with connectivity to SportStracks that had stopped working in the previous versions.

Multi-Sport Activities

Garmin introduced multi-sport activities in the FR920 and Fenix 3 at least. Starting from version 1.23, ConnectStats will detect these activities and download the individual sub-activities. It will display as a stub the main multi-sport activity, but note that only the sub activities will be included in the statistics.

Better weather information

ConnectStats 1.23 has an upgraded weather information displayed. It displays the location where the weather was observed and the distance from the location of the run. On the map it also displays a little wind compass indicated the direction the wind was blowing and the rough strength. The length of the arrow is proportional to the wind strength.

Note that the weather information is only available when using Garmin as a service source.

Upcoming Features for connectstats

Development on ConnectStats has been very slow recently. Mostly because I have started a new app related to Tennis Stats, which I’ll likely release soon. I have a few upcoming features for ConnectStats I still need to wrap up and a few bugs reports to investigate but didn’t get much time to focus unfortunately.

The main feature I have in the back burner for a while is the ability to compute best rolling heart rate or speed profile for current month or year and show that in a summary page. It isn’t working well at the moment, but the summary page is quite useful, so I may just release that alone. The stats tab now by default shows a summary page with key graphs, and of course the old pages can still be accessed.

The other small feature is I finally figured out how to optimise the screen for iPhone 6 and iPhone 6+, so that will be included too. Meanwhile, here is a preview of what the summary page looks like on an iPhone 6 resolution:

SummaryPage

Performance Analysis

In the version 1.20, ConnectStats supports a first version of long term (fitness) versus short term (fatigue) performance analysis. This is a bit rudimentary for now, and hopefully will improve over time.

The performance Index

The analysis is based on two fields, a summable field like distance, time or elevation gain and a second field to rescale it like heart rate, power, etc.

The analysis is based on an index built using this scalable field and summable field.

To access the analysis you need to select from the statistics field view, a field. If the field you select is summable (Distance, Time, Elevation Gain) it will use it as the summable field and choose Heart Rate as the scalable field. If you select a non summable field, it will use that as the scalable field and distance to sum.

Once the two fields are selected it will then apply a formula to get a performance index. The formula in this first version is simply to multiply the two fields, similar to a very simple TRIMP index, but in the future we could change that, for example along the line of normalised power and apply a function scaling more realistically to how the scalable field impact the distance field. This page gives some interesting comparison of the different way to do that.

Fitness (Long Term) versus fatigue (Short Term)

Given the two fields above and the performance index, then we will try to compare the long term accumulated fitness versus the short term training. We pick two periods, the short term period and the long term period, and plot the average performance index of the long term period versus the short term period.

Currently the short term period is the last seven days and the long term period is the month prior to that.

So the idea is to show how much training accumulated over a month (long term fitness) versus how much you are currently training. If your short term training is significantly above the long term fitness, you maybe over doing it. And you maybe taking it too easy or resting if the short term fitness is quite below the long term fitness.

In a future version I could parametrise both the performance index function and the periods used, depending how much people feel the idea is useful or not. So don’t hesitate to give feedback either with a review, tweet, comment or bug report.

Example

Once you selected a field in the statistics view, tap the bottom plot to iterate between the different choices: Monthly value, performance index graph and histogram/distribution of values.

Here is my current running performance. You can see in this graph that recently I have been training a bit more which raised my long term fitness, while the toward the end november I did less running which lowered the long term fitness .

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New Statistics Plots

In the version 1.20, I added to the main statistics page small preview graphs embedded in the table. I also rationalised somewhat the plots shown on individual fields.

Main Statistics Table

The statistics page start looking like this

EmbeddedPlots

For selected fields, you now see a small preview of a relevant graphs.

Here in distance it shows you the cumulative distance of the previous years, one of my favorite graph to track how you are doing on a given year compare to the previous ones.

Note that you can disable the embedded graphs with an option in settings in case you don’t like it.

For the Average Heart Rate and other non summable fields, it will show you the monthly average over the last 6 months.

Pressing the All button on the right will continue to rotate between the weekly, monthly and annual summary. The Sigma icon means it displays the total or average across all activity. If you press it, it will display the stats restricted to either the last week or last month. This enables you to see all details of the last month or week.

WeeklyStats

Here you can see that the Max Heart Rate over last week was 194, average moving pace 5:21 min/km. This enables you to see any statistics over that period easily. The weekly summary of the previous versions was limited to only a few key measures. Note that in this view the embedded plot becomes a weekly plot to compare this week’s statistics to the previous.

Field Statistics Details

If you press any field of the main statistics table, it will take you a more detail information on that fields, as for example here

StatsMonthly

This shows you two graphs and some basics stats. The first graph is a scatter plot against another variable. If you tap on that plot it will let you configure it and choose the second variable.

The bottom plot will rotate when you tap on it between a monthly summary, the performance analysis graph and an histogram of the different values as here. This post describes the performance analysis in more details.

StatsHistogram

Pressing the all button on the top right as before shows you weekly or monthly statistics.

MonthlyStatsDetails