Fitness apps, the new virtual trainers

Activity trackers. Calorie counters. Phones with heart monitors. Technology companies are clearly fascinated with fitness and health these days. As technology starts pushing us to be healthier and fitter, some apps are even trying to replace the personal trainer or the gym entirely. 

The idea is pretty simple: While personal trainers can create a safe and effective workout, they can be expensive and sometimes inconvenient. A fitness app, though, can travel where you are and is relatively inexpensive. 

So I spent January on a personal fitness challenge, seeing what provided a better workout: a real personal trainer or a personal training app. And while the trainer pushed me hard and motivated me to keep my expensive appointments, I found that the app was best suited to my lifestyle and might have the most long-term potential. 

There are many fitness app options, and a wide range of prices. Fitness Buddy offers a huge free library of exercises, so you can build your own workout, as well as some free and some paid workouts for $5 a month or $30 a year. 

Kiqplan is a workout plan sold in stores that includes nutrition coaching, integration with activity trackers and rewards for hitting certain milestones. And Hot5 has a collection of high-intensity five-minute workouts that you combine into longer sessions, with nice videos that feature a variety of trainers.  

But the best option I found was FitStar, a free personal trainer app. For $40 a year, you get access to more workouts. From the apps I tried, FitStar was the closest to using an actual trainer because it can build workouts customised to your fitness level and goals. 

The workouts range from 10 to 50 minutes, and FitStar mixes up the exercises as you go through its programmes. The workouts gradually get harder, and you can rate each exercise individually as too easy, just right, or “brutal.” So if you have strong legs, the app will quickly learn to work them really hard. And if your upper body is relatively weak, the app adjusts to work on those muscles. 

The founders of FitStar said they worked with exercise physiologists and personal trainers to come up with a baseline collection of workouts. And the app uses the anonymous data collected from all their users to adjust individual programmes for each user. 

“It’s not unlike video games where you have matchmaking systems for online play, and they can pair you up with opponents at your level,” said Mike Maser, co-founder and chief executive of FitStar. “We use similar algorithms to match you up with a workout that’s at your level but pushes you just enough.” 

I noticed the progression of the workouts over the course of the month. One downside, though, is that you can’t opt to change your fitness level after you start the programme to make your workouts significantly harder or easier. If the exercises are not intense enough, you can only tell the app that the exercises were too easy, and the app slowly increases the intensity the next time. And the app can’t adjust workouts for injury. 
Working with a trainer

By contrast, working with a trainer took me well out of my comfort zone, protected my injury and probably produced faster results. Like the apps, however, there are many types of trainers. FitStar didn’t push me as far, as fast. If you were starting from scratch and trying to get into shape with only FitStar, the results might be slow in coming, which could cause you to get frustrated and abandon the app. 

However, convenience and price count for a lot, and in the long run, FitStar’s location-agnostic, bite-size workouts seem more feasible than a $100-an-hour standing appointment across town. What is not included with FitStar, however, is motivation. Several fitness experts said that despite the success stories trumpeted on the back of on the FitStar blog, many people lack the motivation to achieve significant results from working out alone with an app or video. 

“It’s easy to break an appointment with your TV, easy to break an appointment with your iPad,” said Michael Boyle, who trains professional athletes and others at a Boston-area strength and conditioning center. And long-term habits are hard to change, with or without technology – we know that more than a third of people abandon their fitness trackers after just a few months. 

But personal trainers are simply out of reach for many people, either because of the cost or the rigid scheduling. So while FitStar might seem like the right solution to keep the endorphins high and the waistline shrinking, the real test won’t be one month – it’ll be two, three or four. Maybe by then I will have dumped both the trainer and the training app for a class at SoulCycle, the popular spinning studio, instead. Anything but the couch.