Personal Software to Stay Healthy — Part 1
I love trail runs and hikes in the mountains. That's the immediate reward for all the training I do. The deeper reason I train is simpler and less glamorous: I want to carry groceries up four flights at 75. I want to hike with my grandchildren without stopping. I want to get off the floor without thinking about it. I want to stay strong and physically independent for as long as I can. That's the kind of longevity I care about, the boring, useful kind.
Staying healthy involves cardio, strength training, sleep, recovery, body composition, stress, gratitude, movement throughout the day. The information about all of this lives in a handful of different apps, and none of them talk to each other particularly well. I wanted to see it all in one place, on my own site, presented the way I actually think about training.
So I built a fitness dashboard, like everyone and their AI agent... but I made it public.
Here's aka.me/fit
It has three views:
Activities: a calendar showing every workout I've done for the past twelve months, color-coded by type, from trail runs and gym sessions to bike rides and hikes.
Vitals: sleep duration and regularity, VO2 Max, HRV and HRV CV, resting heart rate, steps, body composition.
Strength: progression charts for every exercise I do at the gym, down to the individual machine and muscle group. I can see where I started, where I am, and how the trajectory looks over time.
It pulls real data from Apple Health, Strava, Hevy, InBody, and EGYM, and it updates continuously.
!Activity calendar showing six months of workouts
Why make it public?
Fitness culture online can sometimes look like 1-time records and pictures of abs. That has very little to do with what real health and fitness look like for most people. I wanted to show something closer to the truth: what it looks like when someone tries to train consistently, with a plan, over months. I made it look nice because it's a reward for the hard work I put in and a motivation to keep at it. And it's also a call to keep it real: it includes the boring middle, the weeks where I show up only twice, the recovery periods after an injury or a sickness, and the weeks where I feel sluggish.
Honestly, I wish more people would share the bigger picture of their training openly, rather than just the highlights. If we could all see more regular people with a job and kids managing to train a few times a week on average, that might be more useful than another transformation photo.
And there's a third reason that I feel strongly about. Making my health data public on my own site is, in a small way, a form of reclaiming ownership of it. Right now, Apple and Google hold our health data behind relatively closed doors and decide which apps can access it. The irony is that publishing my own data on my own domain gives me more practical control over it than keeping it "private" inside walled gardens.
Why regularity matters more than today's numbers
The design of the dashboard reflects something we should all care more about: regularity over time, rather than any single metric on any given day. Most health apps and wearables are built around "today": they show you today's weight, readiness index, today's HRV, or your performance right now. In reality, the person who trains consistently three times a week every week for a year is in a fundamentally different place than the person who trains six times a week for two months and then stops.
Recent research reinforces this. A study published in the American Journal of Physiology by Dan Plews, Marco Altini, Andy Galpin and others introduced HRV CV (heart rate variability coefficient of variation) as a biomarker that measures how consistent your HRV is from night to night, rather than what it reads on any given morning. Across nearly 2 million readings, lower HRV CV correlated with better training adaptation, more consistent sleep, and healthier lifestyle patterns overall.
That's why my dashboard shows HRV CV alongside HRV, sleep regularity alongside sleep duration, and six months of activity patterns rather than yesterday's workout. The signal is in the consistency, and I aim to keep reminding myself of that.
!Strength progression chart and exercise grid
Your data, their vault
I've spent the last decade building fitness and health products for other people: a running app at ASICS, digital therapeutics at HelloBetter, a longevity studio dashboard at Ydun. Through all of that, I've watched how the industry handles personal health data, and the model has always felt backwards.
Apple and Google store our health data and gate access to it. Meanwhile, every AI company (OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity) now wants to be your health dashboard too, which means your sleep, your heart rate, your body composition flowing into yet another ecosystem you don't control. I think the model should be inverted: my data should live in my own vault, and I should grant Apple write access when I wear their watch, not the other way around.
Privacy and sovereignty are different things. Apple gives you privacy. It does not give you control (even if it helps you control apps you give access to).
How I built it
I vibe-coded it. If you're not familiar, I've written about it before. (Thank you Lovable and Claude.)
People have started calling this personal software: simple apps you build for your own life, starting from your own needs, that run on your own terms. It's becoming possible in a way it wasn't two years ago, and I think it's one of the most interesting things happening in software in my whole career.
The practical challenge was getting my data out of the platforms that hold it. This is where the sovereignty question stops being abstract. Kudos to Hevy, which has a great API. Strava has a solid API too. Apple Health has... no API at all. The only official way to get your data out is a manually-triggered export that dumps a massive XML file, hundreds of megabytes, organized in a way that's useful to nobody. The only reason my dashboard has daily Apple Health data is a third-party app called Auto Export that regularly pushes my health data to a server I control. Without it, I'd have to build my own iOS app just to connect to HealthKit and retrieve my own data. That's a high bar for accessing information about your own body.
!Vitals dashboard showing VO2 Max, HRV, resting heart rate, and more
What's next
This is Part 1 of Personal Software to Stay Healthy, and the dashboard is not done.
I recently received blood work results from Lucis.life (discount code included) that detail the markers I need to work on as a priority until my next test in six months. I plan to add those to the dashboard so I can track progress against specific, time-bound health goals alongside the daily training data.
I'm also exploring adding live heart rate monitoring using the Polar Verity Sense, a band with a genuinely open data protocol.
More broadly, this is the first in a series of posts about the personal software I've built to stay healthy.
Stay strong.
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Visit aka.me/fit to see the dashboard live.
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