Fitocracy Fitness Application IconHappy New Year!  Hopefully you all had an excellent festive season with plenty of food, drink and fun.  It’s back to the real world now though, no more getting out of bed at midday and eating leftover turkey for breakfast / lunch.  If you’re anything like me you decided to go all out over the holidays and made it one of your New Years resolutions to get back in shape at the turn of January.  I took a look through quite a few fitness applications  to help me along over the last few days and I think I’ve found the best one, worthy of our first App of the Week 2014 – Fitocracy.

Fitocracy has actually been live for a couple of years now, but it’s a really neat idea which is why it’s got our app of the week title.  I’ve used quite a few fitness and training apps in the past and they often just get left by the wayside because there isn’t anything to keep me coming back.  Fitocracy introduces a game element, which helps to drive engagement between user and the app (also between other users, creating its own little social network).

When you first launch the app you need to create an account with all of the standard age, height and weight information required for any fitness programme.  Once you’re in open up the menu by swiping right, if you select the ‘You’ button, you can start setting yourself challenges or ‘Quests’, you can also monitor your achievements to see how well you’re doing over time.  By including these into the app, Fitocracy has changed a standard workout routine has been changed into the achievements section of Playstation Online, making it much more appealing and engaging to some people who may have otherwise lost interest in getting fit.

There are of course pre-determined fitness routines and exercises for anyone who just wants to use this as a fitness planner.  With all of the connect and messaging features available though, chances are you will get very quickly sucked in and start using this as another social network.

Fitocracy is free to download, with an in-app purchase option to unlock more features, this is charged at $2.99 a month or $31.99 for the year.  Some of the additional features are really handy, like adding additional routines (8 is the limit in the free account).  Most of them though will just add to the game aspect of the app, like giving you a title and a badge on the leaderboard.