BodBot

We love the idea of having a great body and overall health without having to move a single finger.  While that is impossible, an app such as BodBot is the next best thing, as it manages to act as a personal trainer so that you can exercise from the comfort of your own home.

The app doesn't bring anything new to the table in term of the movement sets you have to perform or the routines you can follow. However, what is interesting about this app is the fact that from the moment you first open it, you have a survey that will determine what difficulty you should start with. This survey is made up of the standard questions, such as gender, age, height, weight, exercise frequency, etc. All these questions are there so that the program can determine what exercises it should recommend.  The list of profile customization goes on, as you can personalize even specific areas of the body you want to focus on. This does not mean that you are stuck with these settings forever since you can always modify them later when you feel you can accomplish more.

After you've created your profile, you can start doing exercises. Each exercise comes with both video and text description so that you can rest assured you are doing all the movements correctly. Depending on how you change your profile and goals (weight loss, muscle gain, etc.) the list of recommended exercises will change accordingly. One thing worth mentioning is that the video demonstrations window is very small so you may have to stay close to your PC (or have a big monitor) if you want to pay close attention to what the instructor is doing.

BodBot normally runs when used on a Windows PC, but some controls and even some interface elements betray the fact that it was first created for mobile devices and then simply ported to Windows OS. For example, the list of exercises cannot be scrolled with the mouse wheel, nor is there a slide bar.  Instead, you have to hold your cursor pressed and then drag upwards or downwards, just as you would do with a finger. Another element to support this is that in some menus, the word "swipe" is still present at the bottom of some pages. This does not mean in any way that the app works badly with a keyboard and mouse, it just means that the controls are going to be a bit awkward getting used to.

BodBot promotes the idea of home fitness in a good way and can be a great addition to anyone wanting to do a complete changeover in their life. Unfortunately, the clunky controls and lack of optimization for mouse and keyboard-controlled systems make it more suited towards Windows devices that have touchscreens.