Five Apps to a Fitter You in 2012
With the holiday season’s too-delectable-to-resist baked goods now firmly entrenched in your gut, you’re probably thinking it’s time to extricate yourself from your Barcalounger, dust off your Reeboks, and saunter on over to your local gym to purchase a membership.
But why spend 50 bucks per month to join a health club when you know you’ll forget about it come Valentine’s Day? Why not invest that coin wisely, in a free—or relatively inexpensive—exercise app for your smartphone?
Start your post-holiday tummy-tucking with these five essential exercise apps.
The apex predator of jogging companion apps, RunKeeper has (and does) it all: split-timers, calorie burn counters, and GPS tracking, to name a few prominent features. However, it is the app’s “RunKeeper Goddess”—a HAL 9000-ish voice-feature that announces your pace, current time, and distance from starting point—that sets the application apart. Cost is free.
As if your burgeoning waistline and those dreaded Facebook photos from your looming high school reunion weren’t enough motivation to get you off the La-Z-Boy and onto the StairMaster, this iPhone app offers another kind of incentive—swag. Nexercise basically tracks any form of activity—could be running, yard work, trampolining, or P90X®—and rewards users with free and discounted products. Prize distribution is best thought of as a rigged (in a good way) lottery: the more points a user accumulates by staying active, the greater the chances of winning.
Really pressed for time? FitFu, an app released in March 2011, uses your iPhone to get you out from behind your desk (or off the couch) and onto the ground doing sit-ups (or push-ups). Operating under the “any exercise, including a micro-exercise, is better than no exercise” mantra, this app utilizes alarm clock-like notifications and motivational speeches from a big-nosed blue fitness mascot to get your feet-a-moving and your heart-a-pumping, even if only for five minutes twice a day. Cost is $5.99.
Hatha Yoga-Your Portable Yoga Studio
Clear your mind and rejuvenate your body with a slew of customizable stretching and breathing exercises from Hatha Yoga-Your Portable Yoga Studio. The app allows you to start out with the basics, and then move on to more advanced postures only when you are ready. Standout features include stop-motion visuals on how to get in—and out—of each posture, as well as voice-over instruction from Prahlada Reddy, a man who has likely taught more yoga teachers than any other living person. Cost is $9.99.
Tailored toward the fitness beginner, this app promises to have you running for 30 minutes—the rough equivalent of a 5-kilometer run—in just nine short weeks. Users are provided with set dates to run, and the running sessions increase over time as your body builds up the necessary endurance. In fact, planning is the app’s calling card. Whereas other running apps only log your daily jaunts, C25K gives you a running schedule. As an added bonus, the app will share your running progress with Facebook friends and Twitter followers if you enable it in the settings.
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