How many of you get up before the sun lights up the dawn to do some heavy lifting in the gym? This is not a survey, by the way. It is a way of getting you to think about fitness apps and how they are transforming the way you train in the gym.
If you have access to Google Play store, you will find more than 70 fitness apps, many of them dedicated to weight training regimes. If you have a set of weights at home, these apps ostensibly take the place of a gym and trainer. Granted, an app can’t give you a rub down after your training. But it can give you weight lifting programs and help you keep track of your progress.
How you use the fitness apps is really the question you need to answer. For example, this writer goes into a gym twice a week while the stars and moon are still out. The trainer is an experienced weight lifter and MMA expert and knows a great deal about how to pace a workout and when to push and back off. It is his personal touch and encouragement that makes the experience worth the expenditure of time, money and physical effort.
Can apps do the same thing? No, they can’t. Nothing can replace a personal trainer. But then the apps are not personal trainers, are they?
Fitness Apps are guides. They can’t do the heavy lifting.
If you take a leisurely stroll on the net and look up Android fitness apps, you are invariably going to bump into JEFIT which uses anatomical charts, pictures, tutorials and logbooks to guide your training. What it doesn’t do is give you the encouragement dimension of a personal trainer.
You can take a cue from this reality when it comes to designing a different type of training app. Because of the push for mobile training, apps are probably the way to go. You are probably thinking, “Most of my staff won’t sit still in a room and are busy most of the time. Why not the convenience of an app?” Why not, right?
Building and deploying an app across different mobile platforms is not an easy task and takes a significant amount of time, investment and planning. And like the gym/app combination, mobile training may serve your project better as a guide and resource, rather than the entire training regime.
It really depends on the training. Weight lifting workouts are obviously a case of “blended learning.” You need weights to lift otherwise your muscles will atrophy. So will your training, if your app is the only resource that you are offering. It will often work out better when combined with a personal trainer.