Streaks Workout
THE HABIT-FORMING WORKOUT APP FOR iOS AND tvOS. $5.99 | streaksworkout.com
STREAKS WORKOUT COMES from the same devs that created the highly praised habit-smashing and habit-forming app Streaks. The premise and look of the Workout app is the same, although with this fitness-based rendition, exercises are combined into workouts and are cycled through quickly, rather than the daily or hourly tasks you assign yourself and tick off in the regular Streaks app.
First of all, select the exercises you’d like to do from the healthy selection provided. You won’t be given all your selected ones to do each time — instead, the app will pick six of them per workout and shuffle through them all until the designated number of reps has been completed. The exercises range from crunches to planks, donkey kicks to side lunges, push-ups to hip hinges and many, many more. There are four workout times you can attempt: Quick (6 minutes), Everyday (12), Tough (18) and Pain (30). We don’t know how they calculate that time, however, because we were always going over the estimated time given, despite our best efforts. But no matter! Select a workout and go for it!
Once you do the number of reps for the designated exercise, you tap on screen to move to the next one (or switch it to ‘timed’ mode). The app will give you helpful tips on how to perform each exercise as you’re moving through them, too, reminding you to keep your legs a certain distance apart or to make sure your body remains straight. At the bottom of the screen, you can see your progress through each exercise, letting you know you’ve done 50% of your number of push-ups, for instance, or that you’ve only got planks and lunges left. You can pause whenever you like and bail back to the exercise selection screen to make changes — which we did with burpees. No, thanks!
The design of the app is naturally very simplistic and the UI practically flawless. At the end of each workout, you’re given your stats: how long it took you to do certain exercises in total, how many reps of an exercise and also how long your workout took in total. And because this is an app designed to motivate you to keep doing it, it tells you your streak count (how many days you’ve done in a row) and monthly percentage (how many days versus how many workouts you’ve done).
We used this app both at home and at the gym and found it nice to not have to decide which routine to do — plus, for those who want to get more serious with their kcalburning, many of these exercises can be made harder by adding in dumbbells, medicine balls or kettlebells. Definitely give it a go if you want to mix up your daily workouts or form new exercise habits.