Impacts of seasonality, weather conditions, weekly rhythm, and gender are obvious in how people exercise.
Image source: skisport.fi
Helsingin Sanomat, the largest subscription newspaper of the Nordic countries, covered HeiaHeia.com in their feature “Hikiset tilastot” (i.e. “Sweaty statistics”, NYT, 24th February). The main question raised in the story: what kind of conclusions could be drawn on the national wellbeing of Finland based on HeiaHeia’s stats? We have over 100000 Finnish users (5% of working age population), which gives some ground to this kind of analysis. As said in the article, “only zeros are missing from our stats”, otherwise our users range from “physical rehab groups to olympic level athletes”.
Inspired by the article, here are a few fun stats on what happened among our Finnish users in 2011.
Seasonality:
People clearly do not exercise evenly all around the year. Anybody, who’s been to a gym or a swimming pool in the beginning of January, has seen the effect of New Year’s resolutions. Other clear phenomena: people take it easy during vacations, Finns slow down during the “dark season”, i.e. last three months of the year. This happens, even though exercising would help you fight S.A.D., the depression caused by the lack of sunlight.
The following yearly graph was plotted with over 4.5 million data points, so the basic variations between days & months do carry some weight.
On a weekly level, it looks clear that people tend to exercise most on Mondays and Tuesdays, and then again on weekends.
December 2010 vs December 2011:
The climate in Finland was very different in December 2010 compared to December 2011. In 2010, winter started early: in Helsinki on 17th November. In 2011-12, winter started over 1,5 months later: in Helsinki on 6th January. The effect on the popularity of winter sports in Finland was as huge as it is self-evident (it’s hard to ski with no snow
).
Women vs men: top sports






























