We continue the series of articles about special services and programs designed to replace you with a real coach in your classes. With their help, you can easily make the right training plan, learn how to perform different exercises, conduct workouts and celebrate the progress made. Last time we met a seasoned Adidas miCoach, and today I want to introduce you to a fairly fresh, but promising VirtuaGym.
VirtuaGym makes it possible to organize fitness workouts, as well as keep a diary of almost any other activity, ranging from running to playing badminton. Like many other services in this category, it consists of two interconnected parts - a website that stores your statistics and settings, and a software client that performs the role of your personal trainer.
To create a training plan, you can use both the web interface and the program in your mobile device. If you decide to do this on the website, then after registration go to the Training Plans section. Here you can choose a suitable training package for yourself, of which there are really a large number here. Not all of them are free, but there is quite enough available for free use, especially for beginners.
For easy orientation in a variety of complexes there is a filter system in the left part. With their help, you can select exercises based on the equipment used, goals or difficulty level. Any training plan can be viewed in more detail, while showing all the exercises included in the complex, the number of sets and repetitions, training days, and so on.
But to make your own training plan will not work here — this feature is available only to owners of a paid account. However, let's not be offended for this by the creators of the service — free content is available here many times more than some competitors for money.
After you have chosen a suitable training plan (yes, it was not easy to do it — the abundance of offers gives rise to difficulties in choosing), you need to add it to your calendar.
Here you can see a grid of your past and future classes. When you click on the selected day, the corresponding set of exercises is displayed in the right part. In this panel, you can mark exercises as completed, delete them, or move them to another day. In addition, when you click on the name of an exercise, a pop-up panel appears with detailed animated instructions for its execution, progress history and many other information.
A mobile client for Android and iPhone platforms is currently available for download. For technical reasons, I was able to test only the Android version, but I am sure that their functionality is not much different.
In general, the VirtuaGym mobile application almost completely repeats the functionality of the site, plus there is a virtual trainer here. The training process looks like this. After launching the application, you open the class calendar and launch the set of exercises scheduled for today. The exercises are accompanied by a trainer's countdown and clear graphical instructions. We did the right number of repetitions, a little rest, the next exercise. And so on until the full implementation of the complex.
Despite the fact that the program offers us a rather rigid scheme of performing exercises, we can pause the counter at any time, edit the actual number of repetitions, add our exercise to the complex. Thus, there is some possibility to adjust the complex for yourself.
Virtual Trainer VirtuaGym is one of the best applications in its class. The functions available in the free version are enough not only for beginners, but also for advanced physical education students. The program combines the presence of a rigid action plan with the ability to flexibly adjust this plan to your needs, which is so lacking for many competitors. However, we will talk about flexibility and competitors in the next article in this series.
VirtuaGym — website, Android, iPhone
