The Best Weightlifting, Gym and Fitness Apps for your iPhone
There’s apps here for running, cardio, ab work, calorie counting and weights. What more could you want?
iFitness - on sale for £0.69. Brilliant app. Create your own workout, log it - it works. Basic but does everything it should. You can go back through your legs, have loads of different exercises with videos. No motivational component which would have been nice as would a stopwatch feature for rest between sets. Best weightlifting app out there.
MyFitnessPal - Diet is everything in fitness so if you need a calorie counter, this is the one! It’s free and there is also an iPad version if you want that. You simply type in the name of the food, which supermarket and then add the calories. A great way of either adding or losing weight depending on your goals!
Nike+ GPS - A brilliant way to track your runs, using the gyrometer to work both on a physical run and on the treadmill. It gives you motivation after pre-defined internals, allows music to be played in the background, can be linked to facebook and even links to some gym treadmills as well providing accurate data. You can also connect it to the Nike+ trainer sensor for added accuracy as well. It does one thing but it does it very well.
iPersonalTrainer - £0.69 (on sale) This app seemed so promising at first. I wanted an app where I could create a custom workout and then log it. This app does that. It also has a BMI calculator, weight tracker, stopwatch, body measure tracker, plate calculator and motivation feature where you get stars for every workout. It also has a brilliant exercise database (the best I’ve seen) and videos to illustrate the exercises. Sounds brilliant, right? Yeah. Until you try to create the custom workout, first of all you can select KG instead of LBs but when you are entering the weight in the workout section you have to enter it in LBs and then it divides the number by 2 (which by the way is not accurate as 1kg = 2.2lbs). Then when logging if you have 3 sets of Exercise 1 and then 3 sets of Exercise 2, with this app you have to log exercise 1, then exercise 2, then exercise 1, then exercise 2. It essentially superset every exercise. If you have 6 different exercises this can definitely cause problems.
Another issue is the apps’ size - it is over 100MB (huge!) This is because of all the videos. After installation and specifying whether you are a man or a woman it should delete the videos for the other sex to save space (or at least give you that option). Or just allow people to download the videos if they want, if not - let them stream. An app update would fix all this - however it hasn’t been updated since November 2011. Don’t buy unless it is updated fixing these key flaws.
Bodybuilding.com app - Needs the ability to log progress pics, and to log max lifts for exercises. Good access to the forum, brill exercise database. The quality you’d expect from the biggest bodybuilding website in the world. Oh, also one major flaw - YOU CAN’T CREATE A WORKOUT AND LOG IT AT ALL! Update this app please
Ab workout - Does what it claims to, shows you a video, you copy it and it’ll hit your abs hard. You could also just follow a routine off youtube but at least this way you don’t need an internet connection. Doesn't matter as there's a free version. Don’t forget abs are 90% diet! You can work them as much as you want but if you have fat above them no exercise will fix that!
