Defy Time Fitness

21/11/2024

There are many fitness apps, but none address the unique needs of middle-aged or older adults who are early in their fitness journey. What should I do? What do I do about my shoulder pain? What exercises can I do without any equipment?

I have been an exercise professional since 2014, first helping workers return to work after injury, then as a personal trainer at Equinox, a gym with a $200+ monthly membership. Being nerdy and always on my laptop, I didn’t fit in with my gym colleagues. However, my reputation as the science-based, form-focused trainer was what led to the opportunity to enter the fitness tech scene.

For the past few years, I’ve been helping realize their mission to help everyone access expert exercise guidance to improve their quality of life. I have hand-selected the exercises and logic behind the algorithm that generates the exercise programs that are tailored to every individual. And unlike other fitness apps, the algorithm accounts for the realities that most people face once they reach their 40s: aches/pains, medical conditions, and physical limitations.

We’ve been working on this app for a long time, and I’m excited that Ginkgo Health is now market-ready. If you or a loved one is 50+ and have not yet found a good exercise program for you, check it out! If you have any questions, drop a comment or send me a message.

25/06/2023

Yesterday I attended a birthday party for a friend’s 2-year-old. To give the gift of experiences, my friends and I chipped in for a pair of memberships to the Vancouver Aquarium. Little did we know that the theme of the party would be sea creatures (as evidenced by these custom-order cookies!).

I’m currently taking a musical improv class so decided to practice my rhyming skills. Here’s what the result was with with their help:
Visit Van Aqua,
With Momma and Pappa.
Make a wish,
With a school of fish!

What do you think? Should I switch from tech to performing arts?

Jokes aside, while I feel a great sense of purpose from my career, I have a greater appreciation for have more dimensions in my identity.

What are the things that give you meaning in life aside from your professional identity?

19/04/2023

**ch

16/04/2023

17/03/2023

My abdominals are still sore from an exercise I did 6 days ago, yet I never do “core” exercises.

Six days ago, I did clean & jerks for the first time in 2 weeks (I also did a total of 6 ring pull ups). The next day, I tried doing deadlifts with the intention to test my maximum strength but could feel the soreness in my abdominal wall even as I was warming up. Today during heavy deadlifts, I could still feel the soreness.

When you pick good exercises and do them with good form and sufficient intensity, the core will be working automatically. Ab/core exercises should be treated as a supplement: Only use them if you are already doing the fundamentals (exercises for the upper and lower body) and have extra time, or if you have a specific medical need for them (e.g. injury).

Although I’m far from my all-time personal record, I was able to get 1RM deadlift personal record for 2023, which was a nice win for a rough couple of weeks.

Now I’ll start collecting data for Roland Fisher’s machine learning project (if you're interested in contributing data for the project and have flexibility in your training program let me know)!

21/02/2023

Today I deployed a tiny bit of the project I've been working on. It's a site allowing you to see an Instagram account's media with the most likes and with the least likes for the time period you specify. As the "like" count changes over time, so do the results.

If you ever wonder why a website or software isn't better than it is, it's because a change that seems simple can actually take a lot of work to implement. I have plans to make it fancier, but for now, I'm happy that I have something that works.

Even though it took a long time to get this site running, I was still able to see progress every few minutes, which is much faster than the rate at which you would see most health and fitness changes. Not seeing instant results is why it can be hard to stay on track with longterm health goals.

It may seem like giving people more progress indicators with fancy devices and apps is the solution for ongoing motivation, but we have to be careful about which metrics to monitor as it can have unintended consequences. It's something I'll be thinking about for a while.

14/02/2023

I figured out how to write scripts to create a collage of my most liked Instagram posts of 2022 (videos are represented by the thumbnail). I used Plotly so the figures are interactive once deployed to the web. Next steps are to overlay some post data such as date, likes, and comment count.

It's crazy how something that looks so simple took so much time to do. I've spent hours pouring through the Instagram API documentation, Plotly documentation, and Google to figure out how to write the code that produced this image. Now that the code is done, repeating this process (e.g. for updated data or a different time period) will only require one mouse click.

The scripts will allow you to visually identify the best and worst performing posts for the specified time period. While I do plan to continue analyzing the post captions using NLP techniques, images/video are likely more influential than the captions. Perhaps at some point I'll explore computer vision to identify the attributes of top posts, but for now, the "real intelligence" of a human is enough for this use case.

Description of the posts starting with the most liked:

1. Me hitting a personal record on the clean and jerk (failed 2x before getting it on the 3rd).

2. A photo a friend took of me on the television news (and my written reaction).

3. A photo of Sus An and husband at their wedding.

09/02/2023

Grateful for the chance to connect and learn last week at the , a conference for women in tech. Meeting so many supportive people has given me more hope and ideas for navigating my career. As great as virtual events are, these in-person events are how you get to know people on a deeper level and benefit from chance encounters.

08/02/2023

It’s a strange time for me. Not only am I searching for work, but I am doing to in a new field and in a field experiencing massive layoffs.

I am prepared to keep searching and exploring for a few months. As someone who loves planning ahead and who hates uncertainty, I will get plenty of practice getting comfortable with being uncomfortable and not knowing what my calendar will look like.

One reframe I am making now is to use this time to explore possibilities and create an expansive portfolio of projects.

Do you have a story of extended uncertainty that you’d like to share? Get in touch!

06/02/2023

Podcast recommendation!

Re:Thinking by psychologist Adam Grant is a great podcast that prompts you to think about the way we think. This particular episode will be particularly relevant to those who code, as it cites research on how the ability to speak English/Chinese was correlated with coding skills:

"And so now we have tested over a hundred participants. They went through twice as much Python training. Half of them were Chinese English bilinguals who spoke Chinese as their native language and English as their second language. And the other half were English monolingual speakers. And what we're finding is really cool. In our Chinese English bilinguals, their Chinese proficiency was the strongest predictor of their ability to produce code. It was stronger than their ability, than their English skills in terms of predicting their ability to create these codes. Whereas debugging relied more heavily on English skills, so you're reading the code, then English becomes more prevalent." -- Chantel Prat

03/02/2023

A great reminder about how language affects our body image and wellbeing.

Posted • Issues around body image can have a profound impact on mental health and disordered eating. Swipe left to learn why the ways we talk about our bodies matter and get some tips on more beneficial language to use. (Full article link in our bio.)

Source:

A large part of body image is the mental picture you have of your body - and the ways we talk about our bodies, both positive and negative, can help build the image you have in your mind.

A focus on ‘body positivity’ can be helpful, but does keep the focus directly on your body and how you feel about it, which isn’t always ideal.

You don’t need to force yourself to love your body every day. Rather, try spending some time focused on what your body does for you

30/01/2023

I did a lot of quantitative analyses throughout my Bachelors and Masters degrees. I was pleasantly surprised to learn how to analyze qualitative text data during my data science program using natural language processing (NLP) methods. NLP is what allows for things like search engines and Chat GPT to work!

Recently I've been been figuring out how to write Python programs to pull data from my own social media accounts using the Facebook and Instagram APIs. Before doing anything fancy, I cleaned the data and simply looked at the results.

Here's a simple plot showing the top 25 words from all my Instagram posts. The top anatomical term is "shoulder" because it's a key joint affected by poor posture!

Notes:
represents all mentions/tags