CREDIT: NICK REYNO
Apps, like Zombies, Run! brings new excitement to the same old fitness routines.

Living a healthy lifestyle is sometimes easier said than done. With the hectic dayto- day routine of work and school, many students end up sacrificing or forgetting about their healthy practices. It may seem unfeasible to commit eight hours a week to the gym, or unreasonable to get a personal trainer while paying off tuition debts, but it doesn’t have to be this way forever. Whether it’s a lack of free time in the day or finding motivation to get off the couch, today’s apps are making it easier for students to get active.

Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock

If late night studying is making it hard to get up for a morning jog, this app will help you to wake up feeling more rested and ready to get active.

When we sleep the body goes through cycles of deep rest and light rest. If an alarm goes off during the deep rest phase it cuts the cycle short and causes an extreme sense of exhaustion, making it more difficult to wake up. To hack the sleep cycle this app senses when our sleep is most shallow in the 20 minutes leading up to your alarm and gently wakes us at this point. By doing this, Sleep Cycle feigns the natural process of waking up and the body feels more refreshed and prepared to take on the day. Having a positive morning outlook can really impact how the day unfolds.

C25K

If you’ve never been into jogging, or have recently broken the habit, C25K is a great personal trainer to build endurance. The app takes after a program dubbed “Couch to 5k” which steadily builds your running tolerance from just up the street to an entire five kilometers. The app schedules you for three 30-minute jogs a week for eight weeks total. To prevent runners from burning out, a personal trainer built into the app lets you know when to walk and when to run during each session, with the jogging portions slowly increasing in length each week. This is great because it allows runners to simply enjoy their run and not worry about timing segments or checking their watch. As an added bonus, the app allows users to listen to music from their phone, only interrupting it to tell runners which phase of the run they are in.

Zombies, Run!

If running seems like an all out boring experience, this app will bring a refreshing twist to the mundane pattern of walking and jogging. The app immerses users in a zombie apocalypse equipped with a full storyline, plenty of missions, scarce supplies and hoards of zombies. While jogging, users gather supplies to upgrade the in-app home base by passing real world locations and completing various missions. Occasionally, the groans of zombies can be heard cutting through your music and the app will notify users that they’ve encountered a zombie hoard. The groans of the zombies get more intense as they draw near and the encounters can only be survived by breaking into a jog, run or sprint. This app is great for not only adding a bit of flavour to your exercise routine, but also allowing you to tweak the difficulty and frequency of zombie chases for different levels of fitness and challenge. Good luck surviving the apocalypse.

Pactapp

At the end of the day, after all the gimmicks and latest trends have subsided, living a healthy lifestyle comes down to motivation. With the bars and variety stores across the street from Fanshawe, it can be difficult to hit the gym instead of the candy aisle, but that’s where this app can save you. Pactapp lets users earn money for working out or eating healthy. Each week people pledge money towards how many times they will go to the gym or eat healthy. At the end of the week, anyone who failed to keep their pact loses the money they pledged and it gets distributed to everyone who kept their fitness pact. On the one hand, getting paid can be a great motivator, but don’t wager too much money because you never know when you’ll get sick and miss out on the gym. Activities are verified through photos and GPS services to discourage people abusing the system and payouts are usually between $0.30 and $5 a week for successful pact holders.

7-Minute Workout by Perigee

For the person constantly on the go, running from class to class and from job to job, 7 Minute Workout is for you. The app takes users through a short seven-minute routine that can be done with just a wall and a chair, making it easy to do wherever and whenever. Helpful diagrams and a sleek simplistic interface make this app and its workout feel like second nature. The app adds video-game elements by using an achievement system and three lives that can be lost for skipping workouts. If you lose three lives in a month the game resets your progress and you must start over at square one. The game is effectively completed when you work out every day for seven months, becoming a ‘7/7 Champion’, which is a pretty cool title.

What are you waiting for?

Surely there’s a little free space left on your phone amidst your music and those photos from the bar last week. If none of these app listed above appeal to you then check out the “Health and Fitness” category in the app store and browse hundreds of fitness apps from around the country. There are programs for cycling, yoga, rowing and everything in between. Let’s beat our beer guts and get apptive!