ANNIE DEADMAN IS HERE TO HELP YOU, THE EASY WAY!
Can a fitness app really help you slim?
Subscription-based fitness apps that include workouts, health tips or recipes have become hugely popular in the past couple of years. Most offer a convenient way of improving health and fitness, and some are great value, while others take a bigger chunk out of the bank account.
There’s usually an online community to help build motivation and staying power, and virtual challenges and notifications propel us to put in more effort. Messages such as ‘keep it up’ and ‘nearly there’ help you remember there are other people doing it too – being part of a like-minded gang is of huge value when it comes to working on your fitness.
One of my favourites is Davina McCall’s Own Your Goals (OYG). Its premium category, ‘On Demand’, offers a huge range of fitness sessions, along with recipes, calorie calculator and results tracker. And all for just under £50 a year. That’s less than a fiver a month, although some might say that the financial outlay isn’t enough to create an incentive to actually use it.
The downside of a fitness app is that no one is watching you. No one is correcting your technique. No one is saying, ‘Come on, Jane, just a little lower in those squats.’ A face-to-face fitness coach has your back, knows your routine, your menstrual cycle, your menopause, the demands on you as a person with work, family, children – all of that matters. Their job is to help you change behaviour patterns too, which are key if you want to maintain results. If one-on-one coaching is beyond your budget, then attending group training classes either online or at a gym can be thrilling and motivating, with the right instructor keeping an eye on you.
There’s no doubt that the choice of workouts offered by fitness apps brings variety to y
