App Review: Cardio Trainer with Weight Loss Trainer

For the past week I've been testing out Cardio Trainer from Work Smart Labs for Android. I've also been using it with the bonus add on feature, "weight loss trainer".

The app basically focus's on exercise rather than calorie counting, which I believe is important when keeping healthy and loosing weight.

This concept of "healthy weight loss" and all the great features it offers was what initially drew me to Cardio Trainer. 

But weight there's more (sorry terrible pun)

A user must first input their data (no matter how depressing) into the app. This allows it to work out your calories burnt per distance and so on.

Once this is done a user can program a goal into the weight trainer option.

First off you must input your weight again, then you tell the program how much you want to loose and in what time scale. The app has a handy little slider bar across the bottom which tells the user their likely hood of failure, which is good for working out realistic goals.

You can then input how many miles/kilometres you believe you will do and on what days of the week, for myself I input 4 miles a day Monday - Friday. This is because I walk to work and walk back most days. This lets the Cardio Trainer set your daily reminders and work out its graphs.

Once this has been done, your all set.

The second thing to do is to start exercising, you simply set it up to record your workout, you tell it what type of exercise you will be doing, and whether or not its indoors or outside.

The app then uses your on board GPS to track your progress (which is becoming more and more common especially on Android devices), and places your track onto a map in real time, it also provides data such as miles, speed, and calories burnt. These "tracks" can be accessed any time from the app in your history or on the Work Smart Labs servers by logging in using the special unique access code provided with your app. Great reference, and it also tells you your total distance travelled. 

Whilst you are exercising you can listen to your music through the app and receive updates at user defined intervals on your progress.

The app will then use this data once saved and add it to your goal, and produce a graph to let you know how much of your weekly required exercise you've completed, and how much of your total goal you've completed. 

It also uses your weight which you can manually input and your exercise to calculate whether or not you are eating the correct number of calories to achieve your goal. This is a great feature as it lets you know whether or not  your eating to much, or unhealthily.

Overall the app is simply amazing. It's easy to use, works well, It's a Fire and Forget app*, and it teaches you to be healthy rather than a slave to calorie counting. 

However I would like to see the ability to export your statistics into an excel compatible file.

I would also like the "updates" during your workouts to be louder and possibly quieten or even pause the music playback, because I couldn't hear them over my Stonesour.

The app also has a function that counts your steps until it gets a GPS signal meaning you can just start recording and then just go, without having to wait for it to get a signal. 

I would like to see this feature improved so that instead of just pausing your workout when you go inside a building, it actually starts counting the steps you walk and then adds that onto your GPS distance. This would let you leave it on all day and see how much exercise you really do throughout the day, all those trips to get cups of coffee in work must count for something, am I right?

I'd recommend this app to anyone who wants to loose weight or just get back into shape.

*Fire and Forget apps are basically apps you turn on and forget about them.