Comparing Apples to Apples
How to See Your Running and Cycling Performance Improvements at a Glance
You just finished your regular run through the park, and saw that you achieved your fastest average pace ever for that particular route. But did your fitness actually improve? Maybe your previous runs were at a lower intensity. Or they had more variation in speed. To really know if you actually became stronger, you’d need to compare your latest activity to truly similar ones, not just those with the same route or distance.
Smart Activity Grouping
The first feature of Fithaxx does exactly that: it automatically finds similar activities and puts these on a timeline. This allows us to easily compare these activities by their average speed (or power for athletes training with a power meter). For example, one of my own recent activities (the rightmost blue dot on the chart below) was a long tempo run. It is compared to similar activities, controlling for aspects including (but not limited to) distance, intensity (when training with a heart rate monitor), elevation, or group size.
At a single glance, I can see that this latest run is one of my fastest long tempo runs ever, given the intensity and circumstances. This smart grouping did not require any manual input from me, and even found really old activities from 2014 with the same characteristics.
What if I intended to break my PR for this type of tempo runs and gave it some more effort? In that case, it would no longer be compared with the same tempo runs we saw in the chart above, but with higher-intensity activities instead. This prevents us from pretending to get stronger by putting in ever more effort into our workouts, and also limits the risk of getting injured because of overexertion. Improvement doesn’t mean going faster absolutely, it means going faster at similar intensity levels.
Interval Training
In the example above, the performance of a run was given as the average speed or power for the whole activity. For interval workouts, that would not make a lot of sense. We would be mostly interested in the stuff that happens during the intervals, ignoring warmup and cooling down blocks. To allow this, Fithaxx recognizes your interval workouts and groups them based on the intervals:
The chart above shows my performance trend for activities with 6 repetitions of 1k intervals at threshold intensity. Note that when grouping interval workouts, the performance is given as the average speed (or power if available) during the intervals. And again, there can be no cheating: if in a rush of vanity I’d decide to run my “best” 1k intervals ever simply by increasing my effort, the activity would no longer be compared to the group shown above.
While the examples above are based on running data, smart activity grouping works just as well for cycling, swimming and other endurance sports.
Try it out for yourself!
As mentioned before, we’re open for beta testing and would like your feedback. If you have a Strava account, you can see trends for your activities within minutes by signing up here.
With xx from Fithaxx
