I Replaced My Fitness Spreadsheet With an App That Actually Knows Me

When used correctly, data can drive behavior and outcomes, but to make decisions using data it needs to be clean, consistent, and visible. The data first needs to be collected in the most accurate and consistent manner. It then needs to be processed, and finally analyzed.

I have always been a "data" guy and have enjoyed collecting and analyzing data. When I attended the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, I learned the value of applying detailed time tracking to software engineering. I learned that if I understood how much time was spent planning, building, and fixing different components, I could use that information in future projects to predict how long something would take or how many defects I might inject.

I've worn some version of a fitness tracker to count steps for over 15 years. For a long time, though I collected step count data, I was passively observant. It wasn't until COVID that I really changed how I think about health and fitness. I started using the data to compete against myself: to increase daily step counts, and to see how many days in a row I could go hitting more than 10,000 steps per day. I also changed how I ate by cutting out processed foods and limiting sugar.

A couple of years ago I took the health and fitness journey to the next level by hiring a personal trainer, who asked me to collect more data. He wasn't concerned with the number of steps per day as I was. He was more concerned with me recording my food intake, and how many calories per day I burned through cardio and strength training activities. He provided a spreadsheet template for me to use; however, I quickly realized it wasn't in a format that would work well for me. Sure, there are apps that do things like this, but there wasn't one app that did everything I needed the way I needed to do it. So I designed my own.

One of the things he asked me to do was assign a score to each day, from 1 to 10, on how I felt I did. There was no formula or definition of success, and this was very subjective. Over time, the spreadsheet evolved with a daily scoring system that was calculated by physical activity and adherence to the meal plan. This custom scoring system became baked into the formulas and would color code various cells in the spreadsheet to help me visualize success.

The spreadsheet had drawbacks, though. The color coded cells were nice, but it was difficult to visualize and compare progress over weeks and months. I also needed to update the spreadsheet frequently — six or seven times per day — to make sure I didn't lose track of meal data, often typing similar things over and over. I needed to record calories after cardio and after strength training. I began to feel chained to my desk to keep the spreadsheet accurate. Going on vacation or being away from home for business trips created real challenges for tracking the information. And editing a spreadsheet on a mobile phone is not a sustainable user experience for me.

This led to a set of user requirements:

1. Stop typing the same things over and over
2. Avoid copy & paste
3. Eliminate as much typing as possible
4. Enter data in a mobile friendly user interface
5. Provide a dashboard to visualize progress and failure
6. Integrate an AI "coach" that could help analyze broader trends and recommend improvements

So I replaced my fitness spreadsheet with an app that actually knows me.

It lives at rade.io, it installs on my phone's home screen like a real app, and every row from the spreadsheet was imported into it — nothing started over from zero. What follows is how it handles each of the three stages: collecting the data, processing it, and analyzing it.

Collecting: the daily entry takes about forty seconds

Requirements one through four were all about the same thing — the cost of entry. If logging is expensive, I log less, and incomplete data is worse than no data because it looks trustworthy when it isn't.

The heart of it is still a day at a time. Open the app and you land on today.

Meals. Seven slots, because that's how I actually eat. Meals 1, 2, and 4 are the same thing almost every day, so an empty slot offers a single button: ↺ The Usual. One tap fills in the whole thing. If I'm eating something different, there's + Items, a tap-to-append library of the foods I eat often, so even "different" is usually two taps instead of a sentence. Meal 7, my evening protein shake, gets the same treatment. That one pill is requirements one through three, solved.

Caption: Empty slots offer the two things that eliminate typing: The Usual, and the food library.

Deviations and drinks. Two counters with a plus and a minus, and an optional note box if I want to say what the deviation actually was. No dropdown, no modal, no "log a cheat meal" flow. Tap plus, keep moving.

Rest days. Separate toggles for strength and cardio, because they're separate budgets. One planned strength rest day and one cardio rest day per week each count in my favor rather than against me.

Workout types. A row of tappable chips — Legs, Back, Chest, Shoulders, Biceps, Triceps, Full Body, Upper Body, Lower Body, Abs — that I edit myself. Tapping one records what the session actually was, which is something Apple Health cannot tell me on its own.

Caption: Counters, chips, and toggles. Almost nothing on this screen requires the keyboard.

Notes. A free-text box that grows as you type, for the things that don't fit in a number: slept badly, tweaked my shoulder, ate late because of a work thing.

Weight and body fat. When I step on the scale, they go here. And critically, I can navigate to any past date and edit it. Forgot to log Saturday? Open Saturday. The day doesn't lock. That's the vacation-and-business-trip problem solved: I can catch up from a hotel room in a minute instead of dreading a spreadsheet on a phone screen.

Collecting: the Apple Health half fills itself in

Everything above is what I type. Everything below shows up on its own.

Steps, active calories, resting calories, and every individual workout sync in from Apple Health automatically, on a schedule, without me opening anything. This is the part that unchained me from the desk — I no longer record calories after cardio and again after strength training, because those sessions arrive on their own. On top of that, the app quietly collects the raw HealthKit readings behind those numbers: heart rate, HRV, VO2 max, and a couple dozen other metrics. Those matter later, when I start asking questions.

Two details I care about more than I expected to:

Workouts stay individual. The spreadsheet only ever knew "you burned 1,518 active calories today." The app knows I burned 1,518 active calories across a leg session, a cardio session, and everything else I did on my feet. Tap the Active Calories card and it expands into the actual list, plus a calculated walking line for the remainder. That remainder has turned out to be the most honest number on the screen. It's the difference between a day where I trained and a day where I trained and moved.

Caption: One tap turns a single number into the three sessions behind it. The greyed-out Walking line is everything I did that wasn't a workout.

I can override a bad sync. Apple Health is mostly right and occasionally very wrong. Every synced number — steps, active, resting — has a manual override field, and the override always wins. Accurate collection means being able to correct the source when the source is wrong. That's exactly how I patched bad days in the spreadsheet, and it survived the move.

There's also a small, unglamorous fix for a real problem. Most strength apps report every session to Apple Health under one generic type, so an ab-focused block inside a lifting session is invisible. If I tag the day with the Abs chip, an extra field appears where I can move that many calories from strength over to abs. Nothing detects it automatically, because nothing can. So I just tell it.

Processing: the score, and the two cards I look at most

My trainer's original ask was a subjective 1-to-10. The spreadsheet turned that into a formula. The app now calculates that same formula live, as I type, instead of waiting on a cell to recalculate.

I earn a point each for: logging strength, logging cardio, logging abs, hitting 10,000 steps, hitting 1,000 active calories, and for each of the two allowed weekly rest days. Then it starts at 5 and subtracts every food deviation and every drink. A day at 8 or above is a green day. It can go negative, which is deliberate. I wanted a bad day to look bad.

Caption: A 9 out of 10, and the streak counter that makes me want to keep it.

Two cards sit above the score:

Days since last activity. Two tiles, cardio and strength, each showing how long it's been and the date, color-banded green through red: three days or fewer is fine, four to six is a warning, seven or more is red. This replaced the score on the current day's view, because the score isn't meaningful yet at 9am. "You haven't done cardio in twelve days" is.

Caption: Requirement five said "visualize progress and failure." This is the failure half, and it works precisely because it doesn't let me round it off.

The streak. How many consecutive green days I'm on, or, if I'm not on one, how many days it's been since the last one. Both are useful. One of them is motivating and the other one is a nudge. This is the same instinct that got me counting 10,000-step days in a row during COVID, just formalized.

Analyzing: the dashboard is where the spreadsheet never went

Requirement five. This is the part I couldn't have built in a spreadsheet without hating my life, and it's the direct answer to color-coded cells being pretty but useless across weeks and months.

Pick a window — week, month, quarter, or year — and choose whether it's rolling (the last 30 days) or calendar-aligned (April). Then step backward and forward through periods with arrows. Every number on the screen is shown next to the same number from the previous equivalent period, with a colored up-or-down chip.

Caption: A good week, one bar per day. This is the view the color-coded spreadsheet cells were always trying to be.

What you get:

• Daily score as a trend chart across the period, plus the period average
• Active calories per day, with the same trend treatment
• Steps and calories, toggleable between per-day average and period total
• Workouts, split strength vs cardio, as a per-week rate or a total
• Green days — "20 of 30" — which has quietly become the number I judge a month by
• A comparison table putting this period and last period side by side, line for line

Caption: Zoom out to a month and the bars become weeks. April 2026 averaged 8.0.

Caption: Twenty green days out of thirty, two better than March. This is the single number I now use to judge a month.

Because every spreadsheet row came across in the import, these charts had something to say on day one. Watching a rolling-quarter view is a completely different experience than scrolling a row of colored cells. Trends that took me months to notice by feel are simply visible.

Analyzing: and then I can ask it questions

Requirement six. There's a button on the dashboard: Ask Coach.

It opens a chat with Claude that can actually query my own records — daily summaries, individual workout sessions, and those raw HealthKit metrics I mentioned. Not generic fitness advice. My numbers.

"How were my steps this week?" "Have I been hitting my cardio goal?" "What did I eat on my ten best-scoring days?" "Am I doing more cardio this month than last, or does it just feel that way?" It goes and looks, then answers.

Caption: The coach doesn't guess. It queries the same tables the dashboard draws from.

This is the thing the spreadsheet fundamentally could not do, and it's the reason the raw metrics get collected even though nothing on the dashboard displays them yet. They're not for a chart. They're for a question I haven't thought to ask.

What actually changed

The honest summary is that the app doesn't make me train harder. It makes logging cost nearly nothing, which means I actually do it, which means the record is complete, which means the trends are real. Clean, consistent, visible — in that order, because the order matters.

The spreadsheet asked me to be disciplined about data entry as a prerequisite for being disciplined about training. That was always a bad trade. Now the app collects what it can, I fill in the rest in under a minute, and the question I actually care about — am I moving in the right direction — is a glance instead of an archaeology project.