I came across something interesting while poking around on my Peloton profile: the ability to “download workouts.” It’s an innocuous little button that shows up in your profile if you’re looking on the desktop website, but after I clicked it out of curiosity, I realized it’s pretty powerful. Here’s what I got out of it and how you can get it, too.
How to download Peloton workout data
First, log in to your Peloton account on the company’s website. Easy. Then, navigate to Profile > Workouts.
Credit: Lindsey Ellefson
In the upper right, you’ll see Download Workouts. Click that and a CSV file will immediately download to your computer. You should be able to open it up in Excel. I don’t have Microsoft Office, so I just opened it up in Google Sheets. Same difference. Either way, you’ll get a spreadsheet with all kinds of data for each workout you’ve completed:
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The workout timestamp
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Whether the class was live or on demand
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The instructor’s name
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The length of the workout in minutes
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What kind of workout it was (cycling, walking, running, etc.)
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The type of workout (music-based, low-impact, etc.)
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The name of the class
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The release date of the class
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Your total output
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Your average watts
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Your average resistance (on a Bike)
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Your average cadence (Bike)
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Your average speed (Bike)
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Your distance
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Your calories burned
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Your average heart rate
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Your average incline (on a Tread or treadmill)
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Your average pace
How I used this data when I got it
First, I deleted the columns I didn’t care about, like the one telling me when the classes I took were first released. Next, I totaled how many calories I’ve burned since I got my Peloton Bike four years ago and how many minutes I’ve worked out, just to see. Then, I started looking for patterns. I generally like cycling classes led by Cody Rigsby and guided meditations with Aditi Shah, for instance, but could the data back up that they’re my favorite instructors? Yes, it could—but it also showed me who else I tend to favor without realizing it. I just selected the column, made a bar chart, and examined it.
Credit: Lindsey Ellefson
Knowing which instructors I’m more drawn to is useful, broadly, for motivating me and helping me find classes, but what about which workouts are most effective for me? I scrolled over to the total output and calories burned columns. I sorted total output from high to low, checked out the results, and then did the same for calories burned. My highest-ever output was apparently a 30-minute Lady Gaga ride. Good to know. (That class was also among the ones with my highest calorie burn.) I can aim to take more 30-minute classes or, more realistically, more that include Gaga’s music. (When left to my own devices, I do tend to choose her songs as the soundtrack to my workouts, so having data to confirm that it gets me into cycling as much as I thought was nice.)
I sorted all of my columns like this, looking at where I expended the least energy, where I cycled on the highest resistance, and so on. Being able to do this was illuminating, especially after having taken a few hundred classes. It probably wouldn’t have been as useful if I were starting out and only had a handful of workouts to look at—but even then, I think being able to clearly see calorie expenditure, output, and other metrics would be helpful.
I’ll spend the rest of the day creating charts and looking for patterns. With this (and a little knowledge of how to navigate spreadsheet software), I can create charts and look for insights, such as whether I perform better or worse in the morning or walk longer distances in the afternoon. When you’re trying to fit workouts in throughout your day, it’s easy to just do whatever you feel like (or whatever you can), but you’re creating patterns (whether you know it or not) and having access to this data can help you crack the codes of your own best practices.
