If browsing the Apple App Store for a fitness app and going through the hundreds of choices is enough to make your brain explode, check out this new study from the University of Florida.
Researchers rounded up 30 popular free fitness apps for the iPhone, dissected what they do, and compared this against American College of Sports Medicine guidelines for physical activity.
In scoring the apps, researchers looked at everything from warm-ups, cool-downs and stretching to safety and assigned them a score for three separate categories: aerobic exercise, strength/resistance and flexibility.
More than half the apps met some of the criteria for aerobic exercise, 90 percent for some strength/resistance, but many fell short in flexibility. In all, two-thirds did not meet any flexibility criteria, the researchers wrote in the Journal of Me dical Internet Research.
The final result, when the scientists combined those three scores to come up with a total quality score: Only one app -- the Sworkit Lite Personal Workout Trainer -- met more than half the criteria from the guidelines.
"The issues with these apps place users at risk for injury because the apps fail to prepare them to take on the exercises, user proper techniques and address safety issues," said Francois Modave, lead author of the study and an associate professor in health outcomes and policy.
Modave said he hopes the study, which he says is the first to explore the extent to which fitness apps are adhering to the ACSM guidelines, "starts a conversation" about how to design apps in a better way.
Here's a ranking of the apps that were tested. The total possible score is 14.
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