Fitness App review - BAU5

Ok, I’m always up for testing new things in the realm of fitness.

Since I was coming off day to day training in the lead up to a bit of a holiday, I decided to scroll through the iTunes App store to see what was new.

Though it reaches back to May this year (2014) I found BAU5, a personal training application that promised 3 workout days a week to get you into shape.

Is this going to kill the personal trainer game? Nope, some people just don’t have the drive to do it themselves and cheating the electronic system might seem too easy to do if you don’t want to be honest with yourself. You cannot cheat a personal trainer. That said, if you are willing and determined, this app could be the ticket for YOU.

Let’s start with a few gripes first.

1.       It is really weird having these REST day intervals. I’m more of a listen to my body type rest dayer. But…it has opened me up to being able to relax a little more on the start of my holiday. Once I’m overseas, I will have to stop almost altogether as I won’t be taking my phone. I did utilize one of the rest days to tackle one of my other passions in the fitness, a RPM class. Being able to see what my next workout was going to be I could see that legs were not on the board after rest day, so I was able to put a RPM class in the rest day just to get back into the cardio.

2.       If you have a really busy gym… Forget about this app. The way the app has you jumping from one machine to another and giving you a short period of time to set up and even throwing supersets that have you going straight from one machine to another, you will not want to be waiting for the machine to become free for your set.

3.        That leads me to the next problem, this app can only be used in a gym environment, and

you had better have a pretty well equip gym to use it.

Now for some positives.

1.       If you treat the app as a trainer and minimize the change over times from machine to machine, you will get an intense all over workout. Some of the routines are top balanced and others are lower body balanced. But in the end expect some work all over the body.

2.       The app uses visuals to really show you how your machine could or should be set up to achieve the weight that they are setting up for you.

3.       You get rest days. SO GO HARD! No need to worry about burning out and conserving some energy for the rest of the week, some people lack about for shoulders day so that they can go harder for arms day. Nope none of that here. I would liken this type of workout to that of Jason Statham’s, “…get serious, do 40 hard minutes, not an hour and a half of nonsense.”

So some other cool things that I can tell you about this app. The app gauges you on an exercise first up. So if the exercise is new and you haven't done the test before…be prepared to fail, but give it all you got. If you think you can get just one more rep out of the weight that they are testing you with, DO IT. You won’t achieve your goals if you just sit back and call it quits early. If the whole set of exercises are new, then give yourself around an hour and a half to complete it all. You might end up doing 15 sets on one exercise before failing and this can extend your workout significantly if you end up doing this with all the exercises.

Once the trails are done, the app will sometimes string together a super set of 2 to 3 movements. This took me by surprise originally. But they give you a heads up as to what the next exercise weight will require so that you can either set up before or move on knowing what weights you are going to have to stack on.

Other than that, the app is pretty self explanatory in its use. Though it would help to have a quick help section to explain what the heck the Flame logo is on the capstone set (and also, I’ve kinda figured it myself, but what is the capstone set?) You do have the ability to view an exercise from a YouTube link that is accessible within the app itself if you don't have a good level of know how on the exercise they are setting you up with (be warned though the guy they use talks...a lot.).

I will defiantly keep tracking with this app for a little while longer once I return from my holiday and see what kind of results I can get from it. Hopefully by then a few more updates might have been made to the app.

If any of my readers give this app a try, please let me know how you go.