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Tracking your training/climbing progress (Read 7580 times)

TheTwig

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Tracking your training/climbing progress
March 25, 2015, 02:23:04 am
So for a year or two now I've been recording all my climbing indoors and outdoors, and just started recording my fingerboarding progress. I've found it quite nice being able to look back and see how I am progressing through the grades (cue some old fart saying I should be doing it for the 'experience', as if grades arent part of the experience  ;) ), it's definitely helped with motivation when injured or feeling crap (suffering from tennis elbow in both arms, so both of those apply) and has helped me identify weaknesses.

Some of the weaknesses were known knowns, some were known unknowns and some were unknown unknowns (to paraphrase the biggest cunt of them all, Donald Rumsfeld). I knew I was best at slab climbing, okay at vertical and shit at overhangs, both on boulders and on routes. That was the known known, the known unknown was exactly how bad I was at overhangs, and the unknown unknown was the suprise that I am actually nearly as good on overhanging boulders as I am vertical boulders, leaving me to conclude that vis-à-vis routes my problems (no pun intended) is primarily a lack of power endurance, as opposed to power.

The other suprise was that despite E1 being the hardest climb I've done (Green bar chart, upper left corner pic 2), I've done as many of those as VS. Not really sure what to make of that! Probably that I should try harder routes...(upcoming trip to the Wye Valley, perfect)

Anyway thought I would share what I do and see what (if anything, is this overkill?  8) ) other people do. P.s no laughing at my punter grades, though the img quality probably isn't high enough to zoom in that far  :thumbsup:




Fultonius

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I duly wad thee for thy strict commitment to tabulation.

Slackers will probably be along in a moment to point you to research that says why pie charts are shit.  ;)

Quote
(if anything, is this overkill?  8) )
Ludicrously so, but I love it!

TheTwig

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Ha thanks. At first I didn't get the pie chart reference, Google is everybody's friend (except when they are being evil ofc) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_chart#Use.2C_effectiveness_and_visual_perception

it makes so much sense that I and I guess a fair number of people around the world don't even think about it. Off to reformat all my pie charts...  :coffee:

At some point I'll do an in-depth post showing how I went about constructing the spreadsheet behind all of that. Excel is actually quite fun once you embrace a certain problem-solving mentality (I'm 26 but never did IT in school or anything, and computer games aren't exactly relevant, so it was hard!)

nik at work

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With regards the done as many E1 as vs point. I imagine this is not unusual. If you go to an estate agents with £200,000 to spend they won't be showing you many £100,000 houses.

slackline

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Slackers will probably be along in a moment to point you to research that says why pie charts are shit.  ;)



 :clap2:

I've been doing similar using a Google Form (so I can enter it wherever I am from my phone) to record climbing indoors (based loosely around The Rock Climbers Training Manual) over winter and have sections for outdoors routes/bouldering too.  At some point I'll be sitting down and using R and Shiny (a package for making web-pages out of your R code/analysis) to summarise and graphically present the results (no pie-charts though).  I intend to do the development on Github so that eventually others will be able to use it.  It won't be done any time soon though (hectic work and life for the coming months/years  :( ).

TheTwig

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I tried the google doc (is that the same?) thing for a while Slack but it didn't have some of the functions that excel seems to have, unless I missed a few tricks. I have a 56gb SD card in my phone and I keep stuff that I need on the move on that and it works okay, though I would prefer something in the cloud.

I've been following the RCTM with okay compliance and getting really good results (over and above 'just climbing' or 'just climbing' + beastmakering)

How easy is it to learn to use R etc? I was thinking of doing something similar but all I know about computers is what I've taught myself. If you ever fancy collaborating ;)

Nibile

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Anoter level of training diary.
My pen and notebook feel both very inadequated.

TheTwig

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Anoter level of training diary.
My pen and notebook feel both very inadequated.

Could be worse, you could have an abacus and use it to count reps..or something  :lol:

slackline

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I tried the google doc (is that the same?) thing for a while Slack but it didn't have some of the functions that excel seems to have, unless I missed a few tricks.

Google Forms is a method of creating web-pages with different fields for capturing data.  The data it captures is put into a Google Sheet from where you could probably do all of the charts and (pivot?) tables you've done in Excel.


How easy is it to learn to use R etc? I was thinking of doing something similar but all I know about computers is what I've taught myself. If you ever fancy collaborating ;)

R has quite a steep learning curve, although the gradient has eased over recent years due to huge contributions from some of the highly active developers.  First and foremost its a high-level programming language, so you don't have dialogs for holding your hand and walking you through pointing and clicking the creation of graphs.  You have to learn the language and its syntax.  That said its not impossible, I've never really been taught how to use R, just did one or two online courses and have taught myself how to use it by forcing myself to work out how to do something in it (and relying heavily on StackOverflow when things didn't make sense to look for previously asked questions, posting when I couldn't find any that helped).

I can't really commit to collaborating at the moment as the time I can dedicate to doing anything is pretty small.  Once I've got things up and running on Github though it will be 'easy'* for anyone who is so inclined to either fork the code and do what they want with it, or they can submit 'pulls' for changes they think are useful.



* This is relative, you'd need to learn how to use Github!

could have an abacus and use it to count reps..or something  :lol:

Don't knock the abacus, they're incredibly powerful...

« Last Edit: March 25, 2015, 09:28:53 am by slackline »

Nibile

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Considering the kind of training I like to do, if it were to count reps, I would only need an abacus that goes up to 3.
 ;D

Serpico

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Slackers will probably be along in a moment to point you to research that says why pie charts are shit.  ;)



Try this with a bar chart...


slackline

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Unfortunately its inaccurate since it doesn't include the other shady side of the Pyramid.  :geek:

lagerstarfish

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I think you need a 3D screen/glasses to see it properly Slackers

siderunner

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Interesting thread, definitely interested to see what comes out, and perhaps contribute on github.

I used Excel for a good while too - but gave up when I went Mac as too tight to buy it. Then used the Logbook & Diary on the other channel but got really pissed when I realised I can't export that diary data.

Have used R as my day job for a number of years, though now converted to Python (and it's numpy + Pandas libs). New to git but we are switching to it soon after years on subversion. [Apologies to those for whom this is gobbledygook!]

petejh

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I love this, geekery of the highest order.



Is this the control panel of Sloper's MasterTrollTM Machine?

TheTwig

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Interesting thread, definitely interested to see what comes out, and perhaps contribute on github.

I used Excel for a good while too - but gave up when I went Mac as too tight to buy it. Then used the Logbook & Diary on the other channel but got really pissed when I realised I can't export that diary data.

Have used R as my day job for a number of years, though now converted to Python (and it's numpy + Pandas libs). New to git but we are switching to it soon after years on subversion. [Apologies to those for whom this is gobbledygook!]

I used the other place to record my climbs but the whole experience is a pain in the ass and it's limited in what you can do. I've enjoyed learning to use Excel, it just requires some flexible thinking to avoid banging heads against brick walls.  Most of that was gobbledegook but I'm determined to teach myself some kind of programming language that I can use share what I've done

Who knows, we might end up with the unofficial UKB Wadtracker ;)

Cheers Pete! :)

mindfull

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Currently do it for weight/bodyweight training. The backend with exercises/energysystems/activity(exercise/reps/weight)/Hrest/bodyweight/... is in sqlite. Input is via web interface. Graphics of correlations is done in python interpreter for now. Still refining it. Might post some screenshots later. Will expand to running/climbing too but for now I want to make it better as it is and endomondo already tracks my runs.

tomtom

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Is this the control panel of Sloper's MasterTrollTM Machine?

Nothing so sophisticated.. ;)


SA Chris

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Unfortunately its inaccurate since it doesn't include the other shady side of the Pyramid.  :geek:

or the other sunny side for that matter.

I love the geekery of this too, reminds me of spending more time producing exam timetables than studying.

PS in the Wye Valley Shorncliff will be a good spot for you to get some mileage in;

http://ielt9.ukclimbing.com/logbook/crag.php?id=39


bendavison

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I've used http://home.trainingpeaks.com/ in the past. It's designed for triathlon but was ok for climbing. Now I normally use a notebook.

TheTwig

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Unfortunately its inaccurate since it doesn't include the other shady side of the Pyramid.  :geek:

or the other sunny side for that matter.

I love the geekery of this too, reminds me of spending more time producing exam timetables than studying.

PS in the Wye Valley Shorncliff will be a good spot for you to get some mileage in;

http://ielt9.ukclimbing.com/logbook/crag.php?id=39

Shorncliff is my big target, my partner doesn't really climb so that rules out most of Wintours Leap, and the yat can be fucking scary at times. I've got Run For Home, Hit and Run and Ironside's Men picked out as my first E2's. Excited doesn't even begin to cover it  :bounce:

 

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