AppCraver » Fitness Calculator

kobeFit – Personal Fitness Manager Will Keep You on Track

Barbara Holbrook — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 17:00:31 +0000

kobeFit — They say variety is the spice of life and this is especially true when it comes to fitness. Not only will varying your routines keep you motivated, but it’s also a beneficial training technique. But how do you keep track of your different routines? And, how do you keep on schedule when you crawl into the gym at 6 a.m.?

kobeFit is a personal fitness manager for the iPhone and iPod touch that is designed to easily keep your workout schedule on track. Because kobeFit aims to manage your fitness life, the initial set up will take some time.

If you plan on tracking your goals, you should start with your basic stats. Visit the Progress tab where you can enter your height, age and name. Then use the “track a new body area” button to really get personal. You can enter up to 12 different body areas to track such as weight or waist measurements. You can also snap a quick pic and track your progress in a photo journal.

Where kobeFit really shines is in its ability to manage workout routines. First browse the Plan > Exercise tab to get a feel for what’s available. Most exercises (excluding sports) have a description that includes information about its specific benefits. Then, from the Plan > Routine tab you can create a variety of workout plans using any combination of exercises. Each plan can be named and put on a schedule so that you know when it’s time to repeat that routine.

Now, each time you sign into the app kobeFit will greet you with the scheduled routine for the day. Just tap the green start button to begin your workout. As you complete each exercise, kobeFit will track what you’ve done so that you can access the information later. If you’ve set goals, then you will also be rewarded as you achieve milestones along your fitness journey.

Once it’s set up, kobeFit puts your workout routine on autopilot. If you’re serious about tacking your workout routine with a minimum of fuss, kobeFit is a good place to start.

My only real complaint is that, while app is well-designed and easy to use, but the $6.99 price tag is a bit high. For an app with a premium price tag, I’d like to see a few more features such as the ability to get an email reminder if I miss more than a certain number of scheduled workouts or the ability to track calories burned (assuming I’ve entered my height and weight).

app_name: kobeFit
rating: 7/10

iFitness Needs A Workout

Keith Lewis — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 22:00:27 +0000

The iFitness app might be the place for some to re-start but for most it leaves a lot of unanswered questions. Medical Productions Inc is the company behind iFitness. But who is Medical Productions Inc and what are their qualifications? Your guess is as good as mine. You’re probably inclined to find out through their website. Don’t waste your time, I’ve already attempted. I discovered a splash page with a snazzy picture of “medical professionals” examining an x-ray above the below text.

Medical Productions Inc. Founded by a team of medical experts, we strive to improve the world by making innovative products. Through the web, print and even mobile phones, our products embrace your way of life.

It’s been my experience, over the years, generally when someone sells you a fitness plan or workout routine they at least try and make you believe they have some type of expertise. Even some washed up actor/actress pimping their fitness wares on the Home Shopping Network has the sense to tell you something and attempt to give you the impression that you can trust their knowledge or lack thereof. But Medical Productions Inc leaves that door locked shut.

I decided to put my fear of not knowing who was providing me the information aside and delve into the iFitness app. I first noted that the directions page offers an excellent description of the icons and how to use this app. It provides a glimpse into the various sections beginning with the Exercise section which contains more than 115 exercises. It also details your ability to log exercises, track workouts, and how to access the instruction page of each individual exercise. Next I learn that the My Workout section allows me to add exercises and create my own workout routine. I scroll down to the Routines section and I find that these are pre-made exercise routines are designed by “our fitness experts” I’m once again reminded that I don’t know who “our” is or who their experts are. I press on and discover the Logs section provides a place to store all of your previous workouts.

I chose to explore the Exercise section and the first thing I noticed was a list of major body sections such as Abdominals, arms, back etc., additional options including exercises by muscle, complete list of exercises, and Add/Edit Custom Exercises. Upon selecting one of the options on the page I was led to a list of more specific options.

I selected “ab crunch on a ball” from the abdominal section. The next screen displayed two pictures of a man on a ball. One picture depicting the starting position and the other the finishing position. Immediately I notice the pictures seem a little off. Hard to say but it just seems as though they were made for another medium and not this app. I tapped into the information page of this exercise and found it to have a pretty good description of the exercise and how to perform it.

I continued to check out a number of exercises and their instructions. I found many of the instructions to be thrown together or seemingly cut and pasted from other sources. For instance the instructions for the step machine states:

For a gym owner, a step machine makes an excellent choice for a number of reasons…This makes them particularly popular with women, who are often highly focused on toning their butt and legs.

Further I found iFitness to be loaded with typos, which gives me pause. If they are sloppy enough to sell this product without proofreading it, how much effort was given to the research of exercises and development of routines. That said, although I did not examine each and every exercise and routine, I read quite a few and their descriptions and techniques seem to be consistent with some exercise books I’ve read and the diagrams on the machines of the gyms I’ve belonged to.

If you are a beginner I would pass on iFitness and find a source that documents the expertise of those providing the information.

For those of you that have been working out for a while and know the basics of routines and proper use of equipment, iFitness may be of use by providing you a list of so many exercises. You might find something that you like or haven’t done for years. ifitness also provides a way to maintain documentation of your workouts. If you’re like me and you write down every exercise and set in a composition notebook you won’t have to schlep that book around the gym.

app_name: iFitness
rating: 6/10

Health Cubby Connects Fitness Friends

Amelia Sauter — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 20:30:26 +0000

Health Cubby is a social fitness app from App Cubby. Health Cubby allows you to set your fitness goals on your iPhone and follow your own progress as well as the progress of your friends. This app does not support the tedious task of calorie counting, which is fine by me.

Health Cubby is not particularly inspiring by itself. Yes, you can track goals for how much exercise you plan to do, how many pounds or inches you want to lose and how many vices you would like to indulge in per week.

It seems that the inspiration and encouragement is meant to come mostly from your friends, assuming they also use Health Cubby. Because this program syncs to an online database, you can see how up to seven friends are doing in achieving their own goals, for example, who skipped another workout or who had too many cookies this week.

For an app with such a simple premise, the interface is extremely complicated. Though I referenced the extensive online user manual, I had difficulty navigating between the pages and figuring out what I was supposed to input where for who. Even after using Health Cubby for a few days, I still struggled to find my way around it. There are a few nice touches to the program: one is a weight loss graph. If you are competitive, you can track your friends on the graph as well. You can also export data via email into Excel.

I am not convinced that the Health Cubby app keeps track of anything that I do not already track in my own head. Maybe it would be fun to use in conjunction with friends, if you can get them to spend $9.99. You can try Health Cubby before you buy it: Health Cubby Lite is free and it lets you input up to ten records.

app_name: Health Cubby
rating: 6/10

Step Trak Lite — A Free, Accurate iPhone Pedometer

Fred Krueger — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 16:37:00 +0000

If you like hiking or just long walks, you will enjoy StepTrak Lite, a free pedometer app for the iPhone by Cambridge, Mass based Aware Technologies. We would like to thank a senior engineer at Aware, Ari Benbasat, for pointing out this original and very useful app to AppCraver. As Ari pointed out to us via email:

“To put it mildly, production values are not where the effort was expended on this product. A huge amount of time went into making the step counting and classification rock solid with the graphical output a bit of an afterthought.”

Having used Step Trak Lite myself on a 1 hour hike, I can attest to this rock-solid accuracy. Every single step that you make is accurately counted in real time with the app. Reset Step Track Lite, walk 5 steps to the right and 4 to the left, and you will see “9 steps” on the display. It even classifies the steps as “vigorous” or just normal. On my hike, about 30% of my activity was deemed “vigorous”.

I also quite like the simple and clean UI of the product. The only thing I would have liked is some way of translating the step count into miles or kilometers. This could be accomplished by having a “step size” field in the settings, or by tying into the GPS, or both. In any case, Step Track lite is excellent, and well worth downloading. In fact, it is currently the #1 app in the health and fitness category.

app_name: Step Track Lite
rating: 9/10

BMIapp

Joe Niemiec — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 23:39:44 +0000

Health and fitness is pretty important if you don’t want to die. It is nice to have this body mass indicator app on your iPhone so that you might live a little longer.

This BMI app is pretty handy to keep yourself in check. It is simple; you just type in your height and weight and it tells you if you are going to die or not. Well not really. It tells you how much weight you should lose (or gain) to get back into recommended guidelines. It also tells you how many calories you need to eat to maintain that healthy weight.

They say that BMI is a reliable indicator of total body fat, which is related to the risk of disease and death. The score is valid for both men and women but it does have some limits.

The limits are:

* It may overestimate body fat in athletes and others who have a muscular build.
* It may underestimate body fat in older persons and others who have lost muscle mass.

In my case it over-estimated; I am 205 lbs of twisted steel. There is no input for “twisted steel” so that essential part of my body just registers as fat.

The app is good, but you really only to figure your BMI out one time, no need to have an app for it.

app_name: BMIapp
rating: 5/10

True Weight

admin — Thu, 01 May 2008 21:31:06 +0000

Avoid the highs and lows of dieting by tracking your weight with True Weight.

Simply enter your weight every day and True Weight will factor out the natural variations in your weight to show you your underlying “true” weight.

True Weight displays your current “true” weight, your weekly and monthly weight change, and a daily energy surplus to help you keep on top of your diet.

With a clear 28-day weight chart and its “revolutionary” interface, keeping track of your weight couldn’t be easier.

Features include: Metric and imperial units, 28-day weight chart; monthly and weekly weight change; daily energy surplus.

app_name: True Weight
rating: NR