Tracking Exercise with Org-mode

Polaris64 has a very interesting post about using org-mode to track his expercising. That doesn’t sound particularly interesting, I know, but read on to find out why I find it worth mentioning. If I wanted to track my exercising, the first thing I’d think of is to enter it into an Org-mode table. For historical or other reasons, Polaris64 keeps his exercise data as part of a more general daily journal.

The top-level heading is the date and under each date there are several second level headings, one of which is “Exercise.” Under Exercise there are third level headings that specify the type of exercise and its “value,” its duration or number of reps, for example. A typical entry looks like

*** Crunches 100

Now comes the interesting part: Polaris64 wanted to summarize the exercising entries into a table. Stop and think for a second how you’d do that. If you’re not intimately familiar with Org programming you’re probably envisioning something involving heavy use of regular expressions and loops. I’m not invoking Jamie Zawinski here; that seems like a reasonable solution but Org offers a better one.

Org has several built-in functions dedicated to parsing Org data and extracting information from it. Polaris64’s post details how to use these to build an efficient solution to his problem. That’s the reason his post is interesting. It offers an excellent go-by for dealing with Org data. If you need Org functionality beyond that provided by the UI, this information is really useful.

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