Apps for the Gym

Happy Monday!

Life has been crazy-busy (which I know is my excuse all the time). I have a day off today, though, so I wanted to make good on a promise from a couple of weeks ago and hook y'all up with the apps I use every. single. day. at the gym.

So, without any further ado, here are the top three things you need.

FITOCRACY

This one is free!

I first started using this app when I began my powerlifting journey, and I honestly don't know how I'd remember everything if I didn't have it.

Using the search function, I first find the exercise that I am doing. It is loaded with so many exercises, and if the one you're doing isn't there, you can "recommend an exercise" be added. In the screenshot below, you can see the exercises that I've done recently. (Because I do so many different lifts each week, I have to use the "search all" function fairly regularly, but it's nice to have some stored as recent, too.)

In this case, I clicked on "Barbell Bench Press." Before I start the day's routine, I can click on "History" and see the number of sets and reps and the amount of weight I lifted. This function goes all the way back to Day One, which makes seeing (and tracking) your progress really great.

When you hit "Finish" after the workout is over, it gives you a total number of points. At first I was bummed about the points not increasing every week, but I'm so over that now. I don't even know what the points mean -- or how you earn points -- so I don't really care about this function too much.

One of my favorite pieces about this app, though, is that it has explanations for all of the exercises and accompanying videos for most of them. There have been a few times where we have had to watch these videos in the middle of the gym, just to make sure we're doing the exercise correctly. It's a really nice feature that they're on the app for us.

If you are into lifting, I highly, highly, highly recommend downloading Fitocracy. It has made tracking my workouts so manageable -- and it's so much easier to carry around my phone than pen and paper.


ALEXA JEAN'S SORE TO THE CORE

This one cost $6.99. (Sometimes it costs $10, and other times the price drops. Follow her on Instagram -- @alexajeanfitness -- to know when to buy.)

So this isn't an app, but I do access it on my handy-dandy cellular device. I purchased the program using the link above. She then emails you a code with which to download the program. I saved it to my Dropbox and to my iBooks -- pretty much every place I could possibly save it.

As I've mentioned before, this is a 30-day ab program. There are four workouts per week (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday), and each workout has five exercises, ranging from 30 seconds to 45 seconds. Between each exercise there is a 20-second break, and between each of the three sets of exercises, there is a one-minute break.

This is what the first day looks like:

This was tough for us when we first started, but now it's a piece of cake. This is the program, y'all, that whipped me into shape and gave me a tinier core than I've had in a very long time. See the progress pics here.

She has a Sore to the Core II out now, but we're going through the first one for a second time. In two weeks (when we finish Part I again), I believe we'll be starting Part II.


Seconds

This one cost $4.99, but it's the best $4.99 I've ever spent.

When we first started doing Sore to the Core, we kept track of time using the stopwatch feature on our iPhones. Unfortunately, I was so focused on keeping track of when we started/stopped that I wasn't concentrating on the exercises, I was worried about messing up the time, etc.

I did some research and found Seconds. There are a variety of timers that you can use: HIIT, Circuit, Tabata, Round, Compound, or Custom. You can create folders of different workouts (like the "Sore to the Core" one I created below) and enter different programs into that folder. So as you can see below, I labeled each week as 1, 2, 3, or 4 and each day as 1, 2, 3, or 4. (So 4.3 would signify the third day of the fourth week.)

When we're ready to go, we simply click on the day that we want to do, and this timer pops up:

The woman will say, "Plank" and then let us do our thing. She'll count down "3, 2, 1, rest." And then the next exercise will scroll up. She does this all the way through our entire workout. There is NO keeping track, NO counting, NO messing up for us. It's all done for us.

It takes a minute to enter everything into the program, but it is so. worth. it. Seriously. Buy this app. Now.

And there you go, friends! Please let me know what you think of these apps!

Peace out!