A short guide on how to select workout exercises for your app. This will help your users stay focused and motivated to follow it and achieve their individual goals.

Selecting exercises for your app and creating a good workout plan involves several important factors to consider. Think of your customers fitness goals, their current fitness level, availability of equipment, time availability and their personal preferences. We will lead you trough ten steps, that every coach should consider.

To help you with some basic tips on how to choose the right exercises, we created this simple guide. Follow it to improve the quality of your fitness app content.

1. Define the fitness goals: Discuss with your clients what they want to achieve with workouts. Is their goal to build muscle, lose weight, increase flexibility, improve cardiovascular health or improve overall fitness? Based on chosen goal, you will be able to select the right type of exercises.

2. Think of their current fitness level: Consider current strength of app users. Like their endurance, flexibility and any physical limitations/injuries they may have. Be realistic and don’t start with exercises that are too hard or weights that are too heavy. When following a well-structured training plan, they will gradually progress and become fitter and stronger. This way you will have opportunity to make all the exercises harder. In this phase, it is more important, to do exercises correctly, than pushing the limits.
   
3. Choose compound and isolation exercises: Incorporate a mix of compound and isolation exercises into the app. What is the difference you ask? Compound exercises work multiple muscle groups simultaneously, examples are squats, deadlifts, bench presses, pushups. On the other hand, isolation exercises target specific muscles, examples are bicep curls, calf raises, triceps extensions. Both of them add some variety, so your fitness app is more dynamic and interesting to users.
   
4. Include different movement patterns: When developing an app, incorporate exercises that involve various movement patterns, but target same muscle group. All the way from pushing, pulling, squatting, lunging, twisting and bending. This will help to balance muscle development and functional fitness. Your users will be able to find the best exercises that suit their needs.
   
5. Consider equipment availability: Think of where your costumers will be using your app for training. Will they be working out at home, in a gym or outdoors? Choose exercises that can utilize the equipment that is available to them. A good option is to provide some modifications to each exercise, so they can select exercises for muscle group they want to train, based on available equipment. You can’t go wrong with bodyweight exercises. Additionally consider investing in some equipment, with your brand logo, which is not too expensive. This can be resistance bands or stability ball, that you can offer to your users through the app.
   
6. Plan the progression: Like already mentioned in point 2, select exercises that are simple at the beginning and allow progression over time. Simple way of progression is increasing weight, reps, sets or intensity as your clients get stronger and fitter. This will motivate everyone, because no one likes to see stagnation when training. Progressive overload is very important for continued improvement.
   
7. Include cardiovascular exercises: Don’t forget for exercises that are aiming to improve heart health, burn calories and also boost endurance. This means including activities that are not focusing on muscle gain, such as running, cycling, swimming, or even rope jumping. When performing this kind of exercises, make sure to mix high-intensity interval training (HIIT) and also steady state workouts. This will again add some variety in the app, so users will be able to find the best workouts, suitable for them and most can be performed on the fresh air. Maybe even with friends and family, which helps to raise motivation.
   
8. Address mobility and flexibility: When creating an app, or even a personal workout plan, we very often forget for mobility and flexibility exercises. Those are crucial for injury prevention and functional movement. You can have a couple of warm-up exercises, mobility drills and stretches saved in the app, so when customer wants to start a workout, they get notified to select one of the available exercises, based on which they like the most.
   
9. Rest and recovery: Even if rest and recovery are not exercises, that does not mean you should not include them right into your workout plan app. Make sure to remind users to allow adequate rest and recovery between workouts to prevent overtraining and promote muscle repair and growth. Again, recovery day, does not mean you should ask your users to stay in bed or on sofa and watch TV all day. Add an active recovery days like gentle stretching to speed up recovery process.
   
10. Always listen to the body: In the end you are developing a fitness app with workout plan and in most cases, you don’t have 24/7 contact with your users to know how they feel, did they have enough sleep, was the job stressful and so on. All these parameters are influencing on workout performance, so please, always remind your customers that they don’t have to strictly follow the plan, because this can lead to injuries and will just stop the progression.
    
    Our tip: You want them to be happy with your app and enjoy it, so sometimes giving them an option to just have a ‘’do whatever they want day’’, without your app, can be beneficial.

By considering all this factors, you will be able to build a perfect workout plan that will be suited to your individual users and different groups and meet their requirements.

Need help? At FunMove with more than 10 years of experience in sports science, we are specialized in creating workout plans and exercises that cover all this steeps. We also have a wide library of high-quality pre-recorded fitness exercises. We also create custom workout exercises, create voice overs, write workout plans and many other fitness related content.

Check our FunMove – YouTube chanel for some sample videos of exercises.

If you have any questions or you would like to discuss the details make sure to get in touch with us by commenting bellow, or clicking HERE.