Now it's time for evaluation! I wanted to find out whether exercising 20 minutes a day without changing the food intake will make a significant difference to my fitness level.
Let's analyze the different measurements:
- Weight & Fat: I lost 2,1 kg in total weight whereof 0,9 kg is fat. The trend line is going down with diminishing changes over time. Losing only 2 kg during 6 months is not much. If your aim is to lose weight it would probably be more efficient if you watched your diet carefully (which I didn't do in the experiment) and combined that with some more extensive running compared to my 20 minutes.
- Body measurement: I lost 3 cm of my waist and gained 1 cm on my chest. I would say that it's difficult to draw any conclusions based on those measurements. However, I gained a couple of centimeters on the upper arm (from 33 to 35 cm). That is probably due to biceps and triceps exercises I have done every time I exercised at gym or at home.
- Blood pressure: Normal all the way. Nothing really to say other that it seems to be a relatively strong correlation between weight change and change in blood pressure (weight goes up - blood pressure goes up and vice versa). I didn't make any statistical analysis to test the correlation though.
- Avg pace vs Avg pulse: Harder to analyze in a good statistical way, so I skip that. I will make it easy for me and analyze a measurement from September 11, 2011 and from March 10, 2012, where I have good measurements on pulse. Both dates I ran the exact same route and distance (3,2 km). In September my average pulse was 169 (max 183) and the pace was 5:18 min/km. In March my average pulse was 169 (max 184) and the pace was 4:58 min/km. Same pulse, but faster pace. If I take another reference point; In March 3, 2012 my average pulse was 164 (max 179) and the pace was 4:57 min/km. This measurement confirms that I ran faster with lower pulse.
- Avg pace vs Avg cadence: This is interesting. There is a strong, inverted correlation between pace and cadence (no statistical measurements made though, but it's visually quite clear). According to this data my pace was higher when I ran fewer steps per minute. This is interesting because it contradicts the theory of cadence (read more about that here). However, I assume that we see this effect simply because I'm such a beginner and I run very inefficiently.
- Running vs Gym: In this chart you can see what I believe is a good correlation to the outside temperature...
Summary: Exercising 20 minutes a day makes a difference. I run faster at a lower pulse. I'm stronger. However, it was not very efficient for losing weight.
But there are obviously other factors that has made a big difference; for instance I feel better mentally and physically. But that is not really the purpose of this experiment.
I hope it was interesting!
Cheers!
/Miguel
