This article was published on March 28, 2013

Cody for iPhone is a cross-activity exercise journal that lets you record and share workouts with friends


Cody for iPhone is a cross-activity exercise journal that lets you record and share workouts with friends

There’s no shortage of health and fitness apps out there, ones that help you monitor and manage everything from cycling and gym workouts, to running and what you should be eating.

Besides the big-name brands such as RunKeeper and Nike+, there’s lots of other ones that perhaps don’t get the attention they deserve, such as Yog, which lets you schedule runs with friends and strangers around the world.

Now, another fitness app has hit our radar going by the name of Cody, which offers a way to help users manually record and share workouts with friends.

How it works

When you first launch the app, you’ll be asked to register either with Facebook, or by email. Once in, you can opt to create your first workout.

a
   
b

You can choose from a range of activities – Gym (which offers a generic freeform text box to record your activity), CrossFit, Barre, Yoga, Running, Cycling, Walking, Swimming, Hiking and ‘other’.

Within each activity you can add notes, time and distance (if relevant). You can also change between miles/kilometres in a separate settings section in your personal profile.

The app has actually been very nicely designed, with scroll wheels and taps enabling effortless navigation and recording.

c
   
d

There’s also simple coaching techniques for each activity, which includes things like diets and workout programmes.

e
   
f

For running, you may be given a treadmill workout to burn fat, while those more in favor of barre exercises get their own programme too. The virtual fitness coach learns things such as their favorite activities, intensity levels, locations and frequency. At launch, it hosts a database of hundreds of fitness routines that will be served up to users based on their activities.

g
   
h

The more workouts you do, the more of a history you’ll have to look back at and see how you’ve progressed. It’s also worth noting here that Cody is more than just a personal exercise journal – it has social built in to the core, letting you follow and find friends directly from within the app.

i
   
j

So, any activity you do, you can share with your friends and receive motivation through likes and comments.

With each activity, you can also add photos and a location (using the camera, camera roll and built-in GPS). And you can plan for each activity via the calendar function.

k
   
l

Cody’s a nice app for sure, and for a first iteration it shows a lot of potential. But people like to be able to use a single app for all their fitness needs, and I can’t help but think Cody needs to integrate real-time fitness tracking features – even though that’s not the type of app it’s seemingly setting out to be. People want as much automation as possible – having to manually enter distances and times, well, that could be a deal-breaker for some.

For example, with other free fitness apps such as Strava, your activities are automatically tracked and uploaded, and you can network with friends and share stats and see precise routes traversed. Cody feels like it’s much more suited towards gym-goers than those who like to get outside, but that’s fine.

“We believe that fitness deserves its own social graph,” says Pejman Pour-Moezzi, Cody’s co-founder and CEO. “That’s what we’re striving to do with Cody – Celebrate your Fitness – it’s a place for your fitness friends.”

Cody is available to download for free now.

Cody | iOS

Feature Image Credit – Thinkstock

Disclosure: This article contains an affiliate link. While we only ever write about products we think deserve to be on the pages of our site, The Next Web may earn a small commission if you click through and buy the product in question. For more information, please see our Terms of Service.

Get the TNW newsletter

Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.

Also tagged with