Fitness Buddy is fast becoming one of my favourite apps. Don’t bother with the free version though. Pay the $2 for the pro version and enjoy all the features this app brings.
Fitness Buddyis essentially a training/exercises diary/log and features a large, well-organised, illustrated exercise library, but you can also easily add your own exercises, which makes this app suitable for serious athletes as well. There is a large library of pre-built workouts, but again, you can easily assemble your own routines.
Entering your workout data is as simple as it can be, thanks to the excellent workout library, where you can select exercises according to muscle group, muscle, even equipment. But you don’t even have to trawl through the entire library to find the relevant exercises, as you can also pick exercises from your list of favourites or most recently used exercises, or you can use the search box.
You enter data set by set into the template, using the number pad which has large enough keys for shaky fingers, or the additional buttons on the left which allows you to easily add to the number already in the template. Click ‘add log’ to add your set. You can review what you’ve entered and delete sets quite easily as well, but it would be nice if sets could be edited and reordered as well.
Another great feature is the direct access to your music library on your iPod/iPad.
When you set up your account, make sure you go to the ‘weight tracker’ before you start entering exercise data, even if you don’t intend to track your body weight . It seems that this is the only way you can change from the default ‘lb’ setting to ‘kg’. If you’ve been entering exercise data in lb because you didn’t know how to change the default, all your data will be automatically converted to kg.
Importantly, athletes can send their diary entries to their coaches via the ‘workout history’, which lists all your training dates in reverse chronological order. Essentially you will generate a spreadsheet and/or text file containing the exercise data of the chosen date which you can then directly send via email.
