
Visually, this is beautiful application. I like my apps to look grown up for the most part. Not too many different colored fluffy fonts and cheesy clipart, please. Despite the knobs and buttons and flashing lights, this is a pretty simple application.
At settings you choose the total time for your workout, how many seconds per interval at what ratio.
I set mine at a 32 minute workout with 30s intervals at a 3:1 ratio. Which gives me a minute and a half of jogging and 30s of sprinting. Woot.
Sounds is where this app differs from other interval apps.
Audio prompt is where you choose what you want to hear to remind you the music is changing and it's time to change your pace. You can hear a guy's voice go "FAST!" "Slow." Or a series of beeps. Or you can customise. I like the robot voice.
You also get to choose your slow and fast playlists. Or choose no music at all. Just play your iPod in the background instead. However, I chose playlists.
My playlists:
Slow
Daughter
The Drowning Pool
Microphone
Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters
Roxanne
Grey in LA
Bad Day (Daniel Powter)
Fast
Unstoppable
All the Small Things
Africa
None of Your Business
Posthumus Zone (the NFL theme)
That's Entertainment
Pump It Up
Bad Day (REM)
Lame taste in music? Maybe. But it worked for me. I can say that's my first real interval workout. It totally kicked my ass.
I tapped the start where it gave me 1 to 3 minute options for warming up. I picked 0 and started with a nice 5.0 pace for 90 seconds until I got the prompt and the music switched. I increased the pace to 7.5 for 30 seconds. After about 15 minutes of this I was really sweating, struggling, breathing hard. So at 20 minutes I slowed my 90s intervals to a 3.8 walk and my 30s intervals to about 6.5 for about eight minutes. The last four minutes I went back to sprinting, finishing at a 8.2 pace.
Run run run. It kicked my ass. I can't say that enough. Today I understand why you should only schedule interval workouts 2 or 3 times a week and for no more that 30 minutes.
The application performed perfectly. It stopped at the end of 32 minutes and congratulated me on a job well done.