"Eat like a bird, and poop like an elephant."
It has been 9 months since I first shared experience to track tennis performance with Apple Watch. Backing up by popular demand(Surprised so many visitors found this blog from search engine all over the world), I’d like to take it further with a more in-depth review, of my own experience tracking and analyzing my tennis workout with the Swing app.
This blog post is aiming to provide a step-by-step guide to perform advanced analytics on swimming data, captured by Apple watch. Microsoft PowerBI and Python on Jupyter Notebook are the primary tools to prepare, analyze and visualize the data.
You will learn how to export the workout data efficiently to your PC, make necessary data transformation, and understand what metrics and dimensions are available. Then I will walk you thru how to analyze the data to answer typical questions related to why certain behaviors happened. You will then see my preliminary attempt to use advanced analytics tools to predict future swimming performance.
Most importantly, you will find quite a few reference articles related to this topic, hopefully fulfilling your intellectual curiosity.
It is also the #3 articles of a series, the previous articles can be found here:
#1: How to use Apple Watch to monitor and improve swim performance
#2: Improving swimming performance with Apple Watch(WatchOS 4)
Playing tennis has been a major part of my adult life: It is fun, competitive and a truly global sport. More importantly, it has shaped my character and my social network. Over the past 18 months, I have been using my Apple Watch to track, and subsequently, to analyze my tennis performance along with swimming
In this post, we will cover the background, the pros and cons of different apps, and how the additional metrics playing a role in my mindset shift.
Back in February in my first post of using Apple Watch to track swim, I wrote about the metrics available and usage in the Apple Watch, a handful of data quality challenges, and my plan of using data captured to improve performance. After logging another 22 workouts since Mar 2017, I would like to give an update, and also share a few more new interesting lessons learned.
Tennis is a big part of my personal life. Playing competitive level matches since 2006, I have won a few tournaments in the “club” level. Ironically, I have never played in a doubles tournament ( never a fan of doubles game, and often complain about not even getting sweaty), nor have I played in a game organized by the companies I worked for (tennis might be such a “minority” sport that didn’t get much attention).
I broke both rules last week.
It was the 1st “3M Open” tennis tournament – featured only doubles matches. One of my colleagues in the lab signed me up for it. We have played together a few times in the past but never played doubles as partners. For both of us, the original goal was very clear –
“Enjoy the sunshine and have some fun. “
In the end, we brought the “3M cup” back home by winning three straight matches in a row. When I look back today, the experience was 100% memorable. But “fun” is not the appropriate word. Instead, it is more of the mix of drama, pressure, heartbreak, teamwork, and a sense of relief.
Let me tell you why:
As a self-claimed NTRP 4.0 tennis player, I am really proud of my passion for tennis. But I am writing this post not for sharing my passion and achievement of winning a tournament, but three pieces of learning I took away from it. Hopefully, they are helpful to my audience, no matter as a tennis fan or not.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFIOGpIQtVU]
Going over the game detail is not the intention of this blog post. (This link will guide you to the official game recap). I’d rather share what I have learned, or more specifically, what inspired me from this match.