An Analysis of Exercising Behavior in Online Populations

Abstract

Exercise plays a central role in many peoples' fitness goals.  While prior work has examined how individuals pursue these health and fitness goals on general purpose platforms such as Twitter, the lack of precise activity recording has limited detailed analyses of individual and group behaviors.  In this study, we explore a recent social media platform dedicated to exercise and use nearly four years of longitudinal exercising history of over 188,000 users to discover large-scale exercising patterns corresponding to different motivations such as sports or general fitness.