Optimizing Gym Usage

As an ardent zealot for gym efficiency, I don’t like to share equipments with others; I want to finish my sets like clockwork, and exit the gym at a deterministic time. However, there are two reasons that prevents me from achieving my goal:

1. As a broke PhD student, I can’t afford to go to private gyms which cost hundreds per month. So I only go to public gyms, which are always packed.
2. Due to my adversion to disappointing others, if asked to share the equipment, I can’t help but say yes.

These result in incomplete sets, which shifts my workout from the optimum. Thus, I would like to avoid people, and this is the starting point for this study: what is the best time to gym to avoid seeing people?

^[my introverted nature might also have contributed to study]

Methods

I gathered data over 3 months (so far) on the usage of my local public gym, at 15 minutes intervals, from 7am to 10pm daily. The data is parsed by the day of the week, and the average is computed at 10 minute intervals. The results are shown in the Figure below.

Discussions

Even from these few months of data, some clear trend emerges. The base load of the gym seems to be at around 40% capacity throughout the week. The clear time to avoid is after 7pm on weekdays, which averages around 80%. For Monday and Friday, the evening peak is slightly lower, which can be explained:

• There seems to be a slight peak in the gym usage on Monday morning (for reasons yet unknown, or perhaps known 👀). This can contribute to a lower peak in the evening.
• On Friday, it’s TGIF, which means more people are socialising instead of pumping in the gym.

There is a somewhat unexpected trend, which is that for the weekend evenings, the gym usage is substantially lower. Thinking about it, it is not that surprising, as similar to Friday, people are choosing to go out to enjoy their night than pumping the gym. Sunday also sees a consistent higher gym usage throughout the day, so it seems like people are getting their sets in before the end of the week.

So what is the optimal time to gym? From the Figure, definitely before 10am, in fact, the earlier the better, which fits with our intuition that people generally don’t wake up early. What if we miss this time period? The next time period is then around 2pm from Monday to Saturday, when I am guessing that people are digesting their lunch. If not, 9pm on the weekends also seem like a good time (weekends are considered peak period the whole day in Singapore, which I cannot access since I paid for the non-peak pass).

Limitations

There are a few key limitations to the study:

• Small data set: I only have 3 months of data.
• Accounting for monthly variations: different months might have different patterns, corresponding to holidays, monsoon etc.
• Public holidays: public (weekday) holidays can also skew the results.
• This dataset is localised to my gym (residential district); other gyms might have different trends, especially for gyms near the CBD.

To address these limitations, I will collect more data, hopefully to at least 1 year. However, to fully address the limitations, I will need multiple years of data, which does not seem to be viable in the short term.