It’s a lot easier when you’re in your teens and twenties to keep that body up, but it’s nearly impossible once you have a house, a wife, children and a demanding job. What’s a geek to do? The same goes for women – the demands of a motherhood, a new career or a marriage can consume all of the time in the day and leave little time to maintain those curves of youth. Is it too late?
Get Back Into Weight Training & Get Your Youth Back
We’ve offered some exercise apps and tips before. Bakari shared RunKeeper for iPhone with us, and Dean covered a few sites that can keep us motivated. If you have an Android, I’m going to offer you a list of 5 Android apps that can give you the tools and the support you need to make regular weight training a part of your daily life. It’s never too late.
1. Start Your Day With Push-Ups Pro
To get started in the morning, the first thing I do to warm up for the day is push ups to get the blood flowing. Part of my efforts are going to include logging everything – so to log push-ups, you’ll want to download Push-Ups Pro.
This is one of the simplest, yet most creative exercise apps I’ve seen in a long time. Basically you lay your Android flat on the floor underneath you, and as you do pushups, you nudge the yellow circle with your nose. Each time you tap the app, it counts your push-ups for you.
Not only does the app count and log your push-up efforts, it also develops a training regimen based on your past push-up results.
Encourage Yourself With Fit Radio
The next phase of exercise for me is motivating and encouraging myself to just make it to the gym. Music motivates me. I love having time to just enjoy about 30 minutes or so of music, so having something like that to look forward to will get me there. That’s why I was pretty psyched to discover the Fit Radio app.
Fit Radio is a mobile radio station configured specifically to boost your workout routine with adrenaline-fueled music. You’ll find bass-heavy hip-hop, dance music or high-energy rock music. Whatever gets your blood flowing and your heart pounding, you’ll find it here.
Each radio station is a playlist of songs – listen straight through, or pick individual songs.
Optimize Your Reps With 1 Rep Max Calculator
There’s no sense working your tail off if you’re not going to reap the full rewards for those efforts. The way to do that is make sure that you’re pushing yourself to your full potential and your ultimate limits. 1 Rep Max Calculator will help you do that.
First, choose your optimum weight – say 25 pounds doing single arm curls. You can do 12 reps before full muscle failure. Once you enter this, the app will tell you the estimated weight for full muscle failure with one rep. This is your maximum 1-rep weight – and that’s the weight to beat.
Use the percentages tab to see how the app calculated your “effort breakdown” for a single rep – meaning, 65% of your power to lift 23 pounds a single rep.
Log Your Lifting Efforts With Fit77
So now you’re at the gym and you’re lifting nearly every day. You know your weight limits, you know your goals, so now it’s time to log your efforts so you can track your progress. The best Android app for that is called the Fit77 Lifting Log.
Using the logging app is very easy. Just select from the list of included weight-lifting exercises and enter in the weight that you used and your total reps.
Those green buttons let you tap the buttons quickly while working out without the need to type. The app also includes a full body measurement feature where you can track whatever measurements you want – weight, waste size, arm or leg size – everything.
You can track your results out over time. There’s nothing quite as motivating as watching your waste size or weight drop off in a sweet graph that looks like a ski-slope.
Get Yourself To The Gym Every Day With KeepTrack
One of the hardest things about starting a weight-training regimen is going to the gym every day. Hold yourself accountable with KeepTrack.
KeepTrack lets you track absolutely anything, but it is perfect for logging how well you stick to your daily exercise rituals. You could track cardio, weight training, or anything else.
The app will provide you with both a spreadsheet of your information as well as a graphical view of your progress. Here’s the gradual climb of cardio effort – going from 20 minutes a day to 30 minutes a day over the course of a month.
You can even add boolean items to track, like whether or not you did weight-training each day. You can see how well you’re doing by checking out the pie chart – you want to see far more “Yes” than “No”!
Fight with your stubborn laziness and make that “No” pie slice shrink down to nearly nothing.
As you can see, each app listed here offers just a little bit of help in your daily efforts to improve your health. Weight-training is a critical part of any exercise program, so make sure that you have as many tools at your disposal to succeed.
Do any of these apps help with your own fitness goals? Do you use any others that you really like? Share your insight and tips in the comments section below.
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