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Fitbit releases newly redesigned smart-personal trainer app

Fitbit is rolling out a new Fitstar personal trainer application that touts Fitbit?s most personalized app experience yet, along with data-driven mobile video capabilities and a new user experience design..

The new Fitstar Personal Trainer app features tailored workouts and recommendations based on users? Fitstar and Fitbit activities, in service to an aggressive drive towards personalization. Customizable music, and expanded library of exercises, and multiple coaching options also give users more to elements to choose from, if the data-driven suggestions that the app itself proffers are not to their liking. 

?Why incorporate data-driven video into a training app?? said James McNally, director of digital strategy at TDT, New York. ?For most people, a training app is a stand-in for a personal trainer, the value of which is to create training that is optimized for the individual, and that evolves as the individual's fitness level progresses. 

?Ultimately this is just the direction of software and tech in general; becoming more customized and optimized to the individual user.?

Fitstar
Fitstar offers adaptive video workouts that evolve with the users as they progress. The app uses your own feedback to ensure each routine is built to match your fitness level, and personalized to their strength and stamina. 

Fitstar Personal Trainer features four comprehensive exercise programs with hundreds of moves, as well as many ?freestyle? sessions such as ?10-Minute Abs? and ?Traveler 10.?

Fitstar will provide a range of recommended workouts based on your activities tracked with a Fitbit device and deliver them right to your Fitbit and Fitstar Personal Trainer apps. Fitbit users will see these workouts in the new Guidance tab coming soon to the Fitbit app, and Fitstar users will find them in the Recommended workouts section of their dashboard.

With this feature, if a user runs five miles wearing a Fitbit device, Fitstar might suggest a customized Fitstar Personal Trainer session that rests the legs and focuses on abs and arms. All users, both those who track or don?t track activities with a Fitbit device, will also receive workout recommendations in both apps based on the sessions people in similar demographics are doing.


?Including workout recommendations based on what's popular with similar users is potentially a good way to build a smarter fitness app?if an exercise is a proven winner among similar users, there's a greater likelihood it will resonate well with me,? Mr. McNally said. ?Plus, for better or worse, exercise culture is highly subject to fads, which will very much be a factor for the type of user who is looking for help from tools like Fitbit or Fitstar.  
?Making sure the app recommends exercises that are ?in fashion? is a way to make them more palatable with users. For example, glute workouts are overwhelmingly popular right now among women, so this could be a way for  Fitbit to make sure the app content aligns with what users consider ?fashionable? exercises that their friends are talking about, or that they see influencers performing on social media.?

According to Fitbit, 85 percent of people who used Fitstar Personal Trainer for at least five sessions reported an increase in strength.

Mobile fitness
Companies invested in health and fitness have been making a push on mobile, and results have varied: some brands have come up with earnest attempts at pushing out good products, such as Shape Magazine, which is seeking to build a Facebook community led by fitness influencers to help readers keep their New Years Resolutions (see story). 

On the other side of the coin, weight loss supplement Hydroxycut recently released a fitness app that looks to be more insidious than beneficial. The app uses weight loss as the primary metric for health, a standard that could lead to unhealthy habits, but will assuredly convince users to buy more Hydroxycut pills (see story). 


?Since joining the Fitbit family in 2014, we?ve known the marriage of wearables and our dynamic video workouts would lead to more effective and relevant fitness programs,? said Mike Maser, co-founder of Fitstar. ?The redesigned Fitstar Personal Trainer app takes the next step in realizing this vision.?