Unless explicitly stated, I was not involved in the development of any of the services, software or articles discussed or linked to in this article. There will be differences in how each device records and exports data so your mileage may vary, but the file formats and libraries we will be discussing should be useful for working with a broad range of popular tracking devices and apps. The methods described in this article are mainly based on my playing around with activities recorded by my Garmin vívoactive 3 watch (which I’ll refer to as VA3 for convenience) or my older Garmin Forerunner 30 watch (which I’ll refer to as FR30), which I have mainly used to record runs and walks. When we say “activity data”, we are primarily talking about GPS and time data which describes some movement-based activity such as a run, walk or cycle, as well as complementary data that may be provided by your device, such as elevation, heart rate and cadence data.

The example scripts can be found at the following GitHub repo (the minimum Python version required to run is 3.6, and the dependencies can be found in the Pipfile): There will also be some example scripts to parse data files and build pandas DataFrames with the data (we will not otherwise be talking about pandas here, and no familiarity with pandas is necessary to follow this article - some basic knowledge of Python and XML would be helpful). We will look at the most common formats for storing and exporting activity data, and explore a couple of useful Python libraries for parsing it. In this article we will discuss the basics of fetching activity data and parsing it using Python. Luckily, with some basic programming skills it is not difficult to parse and analyse this data yourself, and then the only limit to what you can do with it is your imagination. (For example, Garmin’s servers went down for several days in July 2020, leaving Garmin users completely unable to access Garmin Connect.) Or maybe you want to review and analyse your activities in a way that isn’t possible with those apps. Some of these apps are provided by the device manufacturers (such as Garmin Connect), whereas others are device- and manufacturer-independent, such as Strava.īut maybe you don’t want to rely on your device manufacturer or one of the third-party providers to store and access your data. There are plenty of phone and web apps out there that allow you to view and analyse your activities in increasingly sophisticated ways. It is now very common to use fitness tracking apps and devices (like Garmin, FitBit, Strava, etc) to track your exercise, particularly cardio activities such as running and cycling. Photo by Cameron Venti on Unsplash Introduction

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