Pre and post-preggy fitness apps you’ll love

The coronavirus pandemic has made working out at a gym facility during and after pregnancy tricky.  The good news is you can get strong and healthy in the comfort of your own home with these fitness apps.

Baby 2 Body 

This app helps pregnant and new moms stay fit, eat well and live more mindfully in pregnancy and beyond. The free features on the app include one stage-specific workout for each week, healthy activity tracking, daily personalised tips, breathing, and pelvic floor exercises, and much more. The app also has the option to upgrade to Premium, which acts as your nutritionist, personal trainer, and wellbeing coach. The tips, workouts, recipes, and mindfulness exercises are tailored to your stage, goals, and preferences.

Cost: Free on iOS and Google Play.

Johnson & Johnson 7 Minute Workout

The workout library contains 22 preset workouts, varying in intensity and duration. These are designed to fit your schedule, ranging from 7 to 32 minutes – perfect for busy moms!

The Smart Workout feature gauges your fitness and motivation level and creates a variety of workouts especially for you. Your workouts are tracked and can be integrated with your iPhone Health App. The app has 72 exercises and 22 workouts you can customise to create over 1 000 variations – from easy to hard.

Cost: Free on IOS.

Sworkit

This app can take you from beginner to advanced – all depending on the intensity of the workout you choose and the time you have available. To begin each workout, you choose from strength-training or yoga-stretching workouts. What’s amazing about this app is that it adapts the workouts according to your available time. There’s anything from a quick five-minute workout to an intense 60-minute session. Sworkit walks you through each move with illustrations and a timer, but if you’re still confused, there’s a link.

Cost: Free (limited amount of workouts). However, there’s a subscription to become a premium Sworkit Fitness member that gives you access to an effective and simple fitness experience you can do anytime and anywhere.

Freeletics Bodyweight

This training programme adapts to your schedule, fitness level, and goals – whether you want to lose weight, build muscle, or simply get in better shape. Choose from 5- to 30-minute workouts based on your bodyweight only. There’s no need for equipment, so you can exercise anywhere. It offers more than 900 workout variations, covering all your muscle groups for continuous and fast progression. Follow the video tutorials to ensure you are doing the correct moves. The strength-training option guides you through workouts at a gym – like your own personal trainer. If flexibility is more your thing, there’s a routine for that, too.

Cost: Free on Android or iOS.

Fitnet

The perfect workout app for busy new moms who can’t carve out time to go to the gym. Workouts are light, medium, or intense, ranging from cardio and strength training to yoga. All workouts are five to seven minutes, and you can mix and match exercises from any category to make your plan suited to you. You also have access to a personal trainer, to encourage you to keep moving. As the workouts are quick and convenient, the app is perfect for those who don’t want to sacrifice time with their little ones to achieve their fitness goals.

It uses your phone’s camera for a whole new kind of selfie – this one measures how closely you follow the moves shown on the screen. You can adjust the intensity of the workouts – for those days when you are a little tired, to when you have loads of energy to burn.

Cost: Free, with optional in-app purchases and available for both iOS and Android.