iFitness

Do you know what a ‘Decline Close-grip Benchpress’ is? No, neither did I until I’d worked through iFitness on the iPhone and iPod Touch. With multiple updates over the last year, this has evolved into perhaps the premiere iPhone-based exercise aid. It’s worth noting a big bias in iFitness towards using the facilities in a gym, but there are also entries for ‘Stretches’ and ‘Cardio’, each of which is more applicable to those without a gym membership.

The exercises listed are comprehensive and are neatly tagged according to the body regions and muscle groups that they benefit. Drilling down into an exercise brings up photos of how it works, with tabbed pages for description/instructions, for a log (e.g. how many repetitions, what weights, etc), with all entries date stamped automatically and, after a few days of data, also plotted on a chart. Oddly, after bringing up the log screen, there’s no way back to the exercise screen – you have to return to the main index page and then drill in again, which seems a bit inefficient.

Still, there are plenty of lovely touches, such as the ‘60 seconds’ and ‘3 minute’ timers on the log page, possibly alleviating the need to bring a stop watch with you into the gym. If you need a reminder of which exercises you’d planned to do in a session, the ‘My workouts’ section lets you select any from the iFitness database and they’re automatically ticked off after you enter data for the appropriate exercise. You can have multiple workouts, named accordingly.

‘Routines’ suggests sets of exercises according to particular themes, I especially liked the ‘Business Travel Workout’, designed to be done by the iPhone user on the move and with little or no access to gym equipment, but ‘Beginner’ and ‘Body Toning for Women’ were also noteworthy. At any point, you can view your exercise logs for the current day, week, fortnight or month, even exporting the details via email. And kudos to the developers here for including email functionality within the iFitness code – there’s no ugly reliance on closing down and using iPhone Mail instead.

Extras include a weight monitor, again logging against date and providing charting and a Body Mass Indicator monitor (ditto).

A few minor glitches in the interface aside, I was tempted to dock iFitness a star because, although, after an interruption (e.g. a phone call), it remembers completed exercises and also your intended routine, it doesn’t return you to the same exercise/log screen, which can be annoying when you’re trying to get back to where you were, possibly with sweaty fingers. However, the wealth of information and functionality won me over at every point and it seemed churlish to withold a five star rating!