Why Aren’t You Using Fitness Buddy?

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Two years ago, I made (and kept!) a New Year’s resolution to get in shape. The hard part, of course, was getting to the gym, but I managed to make it. For a week I went about randomly lifting heavy stuff and putting it back down like I always had. At some point, however, I sat next to a very large mammal lifting an obscene amount of weight over his head. After his set, he put down his dumbbells and grabbed his phone. I asked him what app he was using. He convinced me, through a series enthusiastic grunts, to try Fitness Buddy (Android , iPhone), so I spent $1.99 to see if it might provide some structure for my workouts.

I had no desire to look like the large mammal who’d suggested Fitness Buddy, but I recognized that he seemed to know what he was doing. I doubt he learned everything he knew from Fitness Buddy, but the app is so comprehensive that it’s totes possible.

Feature packed

Scrolling through Fitness Buddy is nearly exhausting, which is a good sign. The app offers something for everyone: beginners, experts, tennis players or those simply looking to lose weight. Stored in its 51 MB are over 1,700 exercises, workouts ranging from beginner to expert, female oriented routines, bodyweight only workouts (for those of you who hate gyms), kettle bell sequences, specific sport conditioning and more.

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Under Exercises, you can choose Exercises by Muscle and scroll through the Muscle List. Picking Glutes reveals exercises to help you get a fabulous derriere. Icons at the top of the screen allow you to further refine your search. Select from Bodyweight, Dumbbells, Kettlebells and more.

While Fitness Buddy offers a ton of features—building your own workouts, sharing them with other Fitness Buddy app owners via Sonicast, the Weight Tracker and Body Metric Tracker—the app’s most useful features are the GIFs that show you proper form for a given exercise. The rest really is just bells and whistles.

The app is focused on strength training, not cardio, but many of the workouts it provides will get your heart pumping and your brow sweaty. For those who find strength training intimidating, don’t! That’s just silly, and you’re cheating yourself of a very efficient way to get healthy.

Strength training vs. cardio

What’s that? You don’t like lifting heavy stuff and putting it back down? Stop it. If exercise was easy, we wouldn’t make resolutions. You’ll burn a few more calories on the treadmill than you will lifting heavy stuff and putting it back down—true. However, strength training has an important advantage over cardio. Your metabolism spikes after a strength training session, burning an additional 25% of the calories post-workout and making up for the calories you didn’t burn doing cardio. What’s more, for every pound of muscle mass you gain you’ll burn an extra 35 calories a day a day. For just one pound of muscle mass, you’ll burn an extra 12,775 calories a year, roughly 4 lbs—by doing nothing!

As with everything, however, results are dependent on consistency over time. Fitness Buddy knows that, and it will keep track of your workouts and your progress. Because it offers so many workout routines, the only thing holding you back from making it to the expert level workouts is your own will.

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Fit Buddy helps you track your progress, keep track of recent workouts and give you new goals when your New Year’s resolve starts to wane.

I’ve always been into fitness, but it wasn’t until I downloaded Fitness Buddy that my workouts started to count. For me, exercise is about a lot of things: stress relief, confidence and a desire to keep myself sprightly as gray hairs relentlessly accumulate. It has everything to do with consistency over time and an app called Fitness Buddy.

P.S. This video makes me laugh even though it’s terrible.

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