A Story Of Perseverance My Personal WeightLifting Journey

A Story Of Perseverance: My Personal WeightLifting Journey

Assignment 3 - Storytelling with Open Data
By Jake Dyl S4092833

Weightlifting journey

  • Who am I: I am Jake
  • What does a goal truly mean to you? In August 2025, my weightlifting journey came to a dead stop, once a sport where I competed with my closest friends for the highest scores, ripped away. I had just begun to take my weightlifting journey more seriously and started tracking my exercise weight when a wrist injury paired with a heart break shattered everything about me. Today using my personal data, I want to explore the journey I have been undertaking in my personal day to day life.
  • I have been going to the gym for 8 months up until all of this happened
  • The two data sets we will be exploring are my own personal recorded excel weightlifting tracking and the open-powerlifting association

Weight-lifting Tracking Start

  • This data visualization presents the data of the first three recorded weeks recorded within the excel spreadsheets. The visualization highlights the maximum weight able to be performed during a particular exercise over the time period
  • The data highlights the gradual increase of my lifting across the effort I had put in.
  • During this point, my mentality and recovery reflected my lifts

Days Per Week Of Activity

  • This data visualization represents the days I had became inactive from the hobby I was once grounded in.
  • The heat map highlights the weeks of inactivity in red. These days I was focusing on recovery or lifting. A halt to the progress

My return to Weightlifting

  • In September, I picked up what was left of me. Returning back to the gym, I began to track a hobby that I fell out of love with
  • This data visualization presents the data of the five recorded weeks of my return, recorded within the excel spreadsheets. The visualization highlights the maximum weight able to be performed during a particular exercise over the time period
  • The data from the data visualization highlights the two crucial indicators. Firstly, across multiple exercises, my strength was either the same or better upon my return. Secondly, across many other exercises the weight I was lifting on my return decreased.
  • Overall, viewing the visualization, across the five weeks. Across all lifts, the maximum weight I could rep increased.

Exercise Intensity Rating

  • This data visualization represents exercise intensity.
  • When I began recording my statistics I focused on the intensity of my hardest weighted sets. This visualization represents in terms of a quantative metric how good the set was to be performed.

How I compare to power-lifters

  • This data visualization, is an comparison of where my maximum weighted rep of bench press and squats compare to power-lifters.
  • The data is compared to lifters, who are my age (19) within my age class (18-19) and lastly are my weight (70kg)
  • My lifts compared to powerlifters highlight a drastic result, with the average results of both exercises of the powerlifters exceeding my maximum
  • this data was sourced from my own excel and open-powerlifting

Weightlifting journey