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FitStar (for iPhone) Review

4.0
Excellent
By Jill Duffy

The Bottom Line

FitStar coaches you through exercise routines you can do anywhere, and dynamically adjusts them to fit your fitness level. The Premium monthly membership is expensive, however, and competing apps offer a little more.

PCMag editors select and review products independently. If you buy through affiliate links, we may earn commissions, which help support our testing.

Pros

  • Wide range of workouts.
  • Workouts dynamically adjust over time to suit your abilities.
  • Connects to Fitbit, MyFitnessPal, and UP by Jawbone.

Cons

  • Expensive monthly membership.
  • Free account limits you to two custom workouts per week.
  • No offline mode.
  • Not great for tracking workouts and progress.

When it comes to working out, most people want a program that will challenge them without wiping them out. FitStar is a service and app that does just that, creating custom workouts for you based on your fitness level. You start by doing a few workouts and giving the app feedback about which exercises were too tough, too easy, or just right. The app uses that information to create a routine that challenges you in all the right ways. At its $7.99 per month Premium level, FitStar is one of the best fitness apps, though a few of its competitors offer a little more for the money.

Editors' Choice Touchfit: GSP, for instance, is nearly the same but lets you choose how long you want your workouts to be. It also helps you target certain areas of the body if you want. Its Premium service also costs less—more on this in a bit. For a truly free workout, PCMag recommends The Johnson & Johnson Official 7 Minute Workout App , which is also an Editors' Choice. It has excellent options for helping you choose workouts with a difficulty level that's right for you.

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Premium vs. Free
The FitStar app itself is free to download and use with limitations. It's available as an iPhone app (which is what I used to test for this review), an Android app, and a web service. To unlock the full experience, you have to pay a monthly or annual membership fee of $7.99 or $39.99, respectively.

The free FitStar experience, called Basic, gives you access to a limited selection of workouts, although you can only do two workout sessions per week. You also don't get HD video streaming, which you might want if you watch your training on a big screen using an Apple TV ($69.00 at Groupon) , Chromecast ($45.98 at Walmart) , or similar device.

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FitStar

The monthly $7.99 fee for a Premium account is more than what most other workout or running apps charge. The annual price is reasonable, though. The comparable Touchfit: GSP costs $4.99 to download (it used to be free), but its annual membership fee is only $9.99. I also love that Touchfit lets you try the Premium level for only $1.99 for a week. The monthly $3.99 fee is also more in line with what other apps charge.

With a Premium Fitstar account, you get unlimited access to all the Freestyle Workouts, and you can do as many workouts as you want. You also get different workout moves that are not available to free members.

What you don't get from a Premium FitStar account are advanced tracking and analysis tools, such as those provided in Strava Premium. Strava ($0.00 at Apple.com)  is an exercise app for running, bicycling, and swimming, with an emphasis on competition and tracking. If you like to see detailed information about the history of your workouts, Strava Premium is an excellent choice—better than FitStar in this respect. Strava Premium costs $6 per month or $59 annually.

Touchfit also has some graphs for charting your exercise. It keeps track of how many minutes you spend working out your upper body, lower body, and core. If you want to work one part more than another, you can change one of the settings to target one part of your body more than the others.

Dynamic Workouts
You can do the workouts in FitStar almost anywhere. They don't require any special equipment, other than a mat or carpeted floor for added comfort for some moves. It does require an Internet connection, though, and the streaming could eat up both phone battery and data if you don't have available Wi-Fi.

FitStar

Touchfit is nearly the same, though every so often, a resistance band comes into play. If you don't have one, you can toggle off an option in the settings to make sure you don't get exercises you can't do.

There are two basic types of workouts in FitStar: Programs and Freestyle. Programs are really the backbone of the app. These are the workouts that dynamically change to suit your fitness level. Freestyle workouts are sets of exercises you can choose to do anytime, and they hit on a variety of fitness goals, such as working on your abs or squeezing in a quick workout in a hotel room.

For both Freestyle and Program workouts, each session comprises a series of exercises that you are told to do for a set amount of time. Breaks are built into the routines. Before you begin the session, you see a list of the exercise moves, color-coded to a difficulty level, so you have an idea of what's ahead. If you tap on any of the exercises in the preview, FitStar shows an text-based explanation and video of how to do it.

At the end of each set, the app asks you rate how hard it was to complete. Depending on the move, FitStar also asks either many reps you were able to complete, as is the case with push-ups, or for how many seconds you lasted, as with planks.

Over time, FitStar uses your feedback to adjust your Program workouts so that they become challenging but not impossible. For example, if you cannot do push-ups at all, the app might take push-ups out of rotation for a while and swap in kneeling push-ups or wall push-ups instead. If you tell it that squats are easy as pie, it will increase the difficulty with a longer set time or swap in harder moves that target the same muscles.

Some of the other exercises in the app include low jacks, which are jumping jacks done in a half squat, twisting mountain climbers, shadow boxing, and air jump rope.

Touchfit GSP is very similar in how it creates dynamic workouts. The two apps have different types of moves, but the real difference comes down to which coach you prefer.

Music and Integrations
It took me a little poking around to figure out how to play my own music while working out with FitStar, but it can be done. You can play songs from your Apple Music app or any other app, and you can adjust the volume of the FitStar app so that you can hear instructions. I wish there were a button for music right on the workout screen, though.

FitStar offers integration with other fitness apps and services, including Fitbit, MyFitnessPal ($0.00 at MyFitnessPal) , and the Jawbone UP. When you connect FitStar to any of these services, the calories you burn using FitStar will show up in the other app.

Fitbit, which acquired FitStar in 2015, has a special integration with the Fitbit Blaze ($236.70 at Amazon) . When you workout with FitStar while wearing a Blaze, you can get the coaching information right on your watch. For all other Fitbit devices, if you connect your Fitbit account to FitStar, you'll see your workouts count toward calories burned for the day.

Mr. Fitness
Both FitStar and Touchfit have a star coach have voice-overs throughout the training sessions. In FitStar, it's former American football player, Tony Gonzalez. He does some of the moves with you in the videos that play along, but sometimes there are other trainers. In Touchfit, it's Canadian semi-retired mixed martial artist, George St-Pierre (the "GSP" of the app's title). He's in every single video.

Gonzalez is smiley and upbeat. He says things like, "Good job," "You got this," and "Golden!" St-Pierre keeps a straight face and looks much more rigid. He's more reserved, too. Fifteen minutes into a workout, the most he said was, "Squeeze your glutes," and "Remember to keep your abs tight." He maintains an austere composure. I like Monsieur GSP and his Quebecois accent, but I can see how a lot of people would prefer Gonzalez's encouragement and spunk.

One aspect of Touchfit that I really like and that I wish were in FitStar is the ability to choose the length of my dynamically generated workout. Before a workout begins, I can select 10, 20, 40, or 60 minutes. In Fitstar, you can't choose the length of a Program workout. When looking for a Freestyle workout, you can see how many minutes they take before selecting one.

FitStar's workouts can be hard if you push yourself and don't treat the feedback mechanism lightly. But Touchfit's workouts were harder for me. There were challenging moves that required strength, balance, and flexibility, and I am kind of delighted to not be able to do them all yet. With FitStar, I could do every exercise right from the start, even if for only one rep.

Get Fit
FitStar brings customized workouts to you, and if you like an upbeat, friendly voice coaching you through moves that are likely already familiar to you, it's a great app. The month-to-month Premium option is expensive, however, so if you enjoy the app and Premium features, you're better off paying for a year's subscription up front.

If you prefer to really get your butt kicked by a workout app, try Touchfit: GSP instead. It remains our Editors' Choice because it's challenging and has excellent settings and features. But maybe you don't want to pay for your workouts at all. In that case, stick with The Johnson & Johnson Official 7 Minute Workout App. Among truly free apps for working out, it's by far the best.

FitStar (for iPhone)
4.0
Pros
  • Wide range of workouts.
  • Workouts dynamically adjust over time to suit your abilities.
  • Connects to Fitbit, MyFitnessPal, and UP by Jawbone.
Cons
  • Expensive monthly membership.
  • Free account limits you to two custom workouts per week.
  • No offline mode.
  • Not great for tracking workouts and progress.
View More
The Bottom Line

FitStar coaches you through exercise routines you can do anywhere, and dynamically adjusts them to fit your fitness level. The Premium monthly membership is expensive, however, and competing apps offer a little more.

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About Jill Duffy

Columnist and Deputy Managing Editor, Software

I've been contributing to PCMag since 2011 and am currently the deputy managing editor for the software team. My column, Get Organized, has been running on PCMag since 2012. It gives advice on how to manage all the devices, apps, digital photos, email, and other technology that can make you feel like you're going to have a panic attack.

My latest book is The Everything Guide to Remote Work, which goes into great detail about a subject that I've been covering as a writer and participating in personally since well before the COVID-19 pandemic.

I specialize in apps for productivity and collaboration, including project management software. I also test and analyze online learning services, particularly for learning languages.

Prior to working for PCMag, I was the managing editor of Game Developer magazine. I've also worked at the Association for Computing Machinery, The Examiner newspaper in San Francisco, and The American Institute of Physics. I was once profiled in an article in Vogue India alongside Marie Kondo.

Follow me on Mastodon.

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FitStar (for iPhone) $0.00 at Apple.com
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