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Running shoes? Check. Workout clothes? Check. Water bottle? Check. iPhone? Huh?
Yep, if you pack an iPhone in your workout bag, you add a personal trainer, logbook, calorie counter, heart monitor, weight watcher, dietician, and physician to your arsenal. For those who work out routinely, it can sometimes take every trick in the book to keep you focused and motivated. You’re already joined at the hip with your iPhone, so why not put it to work as your personal fitness coach? To give you an idea of the apps available to keep you on target, we’ve rounded up a few that caught our eye.
Personal Trainers
iFitness ($1.99, Medical Productions) provides pictures and instructions of over 150 exercises, for which you can browse by body parts or muscle groups. You can use their routines or add your own exercises and customized routines and track your progress by recording your weights and reps, which can then be emailed to you.
iStayFit ($5.99, Looti Inc.) allows you to design your own workout program or use their predefined sets, complete with pictures. This app will also help you log your workout (weights, sets, reps) and can graph your progress.
Logbooks
Gym Buddy ($2.99, Anywise Enterprise) is good when no one will accompany you to the gym on a regular basis. With this app you can record your workout, monitor your progress, and keep yourself motivated.
Fit Phone ($4.99, badaronco) is an electronic workout log and weight tracker. Once you set up your logbook utilizing their workouts or customizing it to suit your needs, you can access graphs that will help you track your progress.
Calorie Counters
Livestrong Calorie Tracker ($2.99, livestrong.com) will track your caloric intake in relationship with your exercise and compute your daily progress--after you setup your profile and painstakingly enter your eating habits. But, no pain, no gain, right? And, you get to hook into Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong foundation.
Lose It! (Free, FitNow Inc) helps you stay on track by monitoring the calories you consume. Lose It Will create a “calorie budget” for you by factoring in your age, weight-loss goals, and activity level, and then help you track your daily allotment. And, it’s free, so what have you got to lose?
Nutrition Menu Calorie Counter ($1.99, Shroomies) enables you to access nutritional information, including fats, calories, carbs and fiber, for over 78,000 food items (no Internet connection necessary). The app covers many common restaurant items, but if you don’t eat out too much, it may not be that helpful. Although, it could be handy for travelers.
Weight Trackers
Weightbot ($1.99, Tapbots) is a weight-tracking robot that will help you set goals, see your BMI, and record and graph your weight-losing journey.
Heart Monitors
iPulse ($0.99, BIC Development), which includes a timer, target heart-rate calculator, and resting heart-rate calculator, will assess your healthy heart range after you’ve counted your pulses and plugged them into the app's calculator. Sound like too much work? Try:
Heart Monitor ($3.99, Bluespark) utilizes the iPhone’s built-in microphone (or the mic on your headset) to detect your heartbeats and count them for you. You can determine your resting heart rate and then track your accelerating heartbeats during your workout. The only caveat: You must know exactly where to find your pulse.
