Muscle Pumping

Android and iPhone: We’ve looked at how to turn your Android or iPhone into a personal trainer, but Fitness Buddy is an app that covers most of your bases in one sweep. It not only provides instructions for more than 1,700 exercises, but also plans and tracks your workouts, weight and body metrics, and blood pressure.

Fitness Buddy offers preset workouts for you, but you can define your own. In fact, you can add your own specific exercises, too, if Fitness Buddy doesn’t already have them included. If you want to explore new exercises, you can browse by muscle group or target a specific muscle by tapping it on a diagram of the human body. Each exercise is explained with text and a picture in a series of cards so you get a quick understanding of what it entails. Once you’ve got everything defined and your workout planned, Fitness Buddy will keep track of it all on a calendar view so you can see what you’ve done and have coming up. When you’re actually exercising, you can use the app’s built-in music player to create a quick playlist. Finally, you can view and export your history at any time.

While Fitness Buddy is definitely not the first app to put together a compilation of exercises and help you plan your workouts – Nike Training Club is a good one if you want video – it’s the most comprehensive I’ve seen. If you want access to a ton of different exercise instructions and plenty of ways to comprehensively track your progress, Fitness Buddy ($1 in both the iTunes app store and Android Market) is an app worth checking out.