Product: Fitness Apps
Manufacturer: Roundup:
Wired Rating: 0
Getting in shape is way easier with a personal trainer. Can’t afford one with your financial aid package? No problem. A fitness app is a good stand-in, cataloging your calorie intake, monitoring exercise output, and setting you on the road for squeezing into some seriously skinny jeans.
1. GymGoal
WIRED Body map allows you to target and call up exercises for specific muscle groups and/or parts of the body, and see how many days where you worked those areas. Go deep (if you want): Log specific single exercises, or pre-programmed and custom workouts; track measurements for, uh, specific body parts (No, not that! Think: waist, bicep). Cloud patrol: Data can be backed-up on external server. Solid muscle-building, fat-cutting tips with easy-to-grok animated demos and text.
TIRED Exercises and workouts are timed automatically (cool, provided you want to spend your gym-time on your phone; or ignore the timed field). Pre-set whole-body and full-body workouts don’t specify rest time or expected duration. Get-to-the-point: Tips on “breathing” are actually, well, pretty long-winded. Only $4!
$4, http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gymgoal
2. FitnessBuilder</strong
WIRED Workout Builder is more intuitive than a pack of chewing gum: Drag-and-dropping labeled JPGs organized by muscle group. Equipment Category: Allows you to call up exercises by barbell, cables, dumbbells and more. Spice of life: Intense variety per muscle group with numerous grips and movement angles (more than 40 exercises for biceps alone, and more esoteric routines like hip abduction). Way more detail and options than GymGoal. Sleek interface design.
TIRED Videos can take forever to upload. $10 = 2.5 times as expensive as GymGoal, which is fine for beginner/intermediate Arnolds. Beginner’s beware: A potentially overwhelming number of possibilities (again, 40 exercises just for biceps).
$10, itunes.apple.com/app/fitnessbuilder
3. Lose It!
WIRED Deep, varied catalog of foods/exercises to choose from and log; includes everything from various nibbles like Velveeta and Weetabix to “sports” like badminton and tobogganing (with mostly spot-on calorie counts). Beyond simple to use and keep up. Stripped-down, clean interface. FREE! Automated motivational sharing (“Motivators”) allow you to share progress with Twitter/Facebook/e-mail and set reminders for specific goals per meal.
TIRED No backdating any exercise(s) or food(s). No zooming in or examining trend charts and data: i.e. complete and utterly pointless inability to see specific weight(s) on previous days. Using Motivators requires creating a login/password for loseit.com, and specifying said reminders online, not in the app itself.
FREE, loseit.com
4. Slim It
WIRED Time-coded entries! Easy to backlog what you ate for breakfast at, say, 2 p.m. or 11 p.m. “Brunch” is considered a legitimate category. Exercise video how-tos and demos boast high-production values (and attractive femal model*).
TIRED HCUA Alert!: Initial login requires inputting height/weight via the metric system (kg/cm). Curiously incomplete list of foods: No “oatmeal” or “cereal”? Food list also, quite inexplicably, includes 13 separate entries for “ham sandwich,” all with different calorie counts. Can’t backlog food consumed on previous days. Stretching/exercise demos are video-only (i.e. zero written instructions). *Attractive female model cuts down on productivity.
FREE, itunes.apple.com/us/app/fitness-slim-it
