I like having some direction in my life, but signing on for a 12-week running program, or a full week of specific meals, is kind of a big commitment. Adidas’s new fitness app, All Day (free on iOS and Android), takes a different approach: it’s full of short, self-contained adventures to choose. Take the strength and high-intensity interval training (HIIT) workout plan from Stephen Cheuk. It’s really just two workouts: one for strength, one for HIIT. The app helps you set up reminders—three times a week for two weeks, it suggests—and when the time comes, you pick one of the workouts and do it. That’s it. The “discoveries,” as the app calls them, aren’t just for exercise. There are recipe collections, for example. Let’s say you want to try the “H2O Know” discovery that includes seven recipes for infused waters. You pick how many you want to make—say, three—and the app marks the discovery as complete once you’ve done that many. (The best of the bunch: Replenish, which has half a sliced orange, half a sliced lemon, one tablespoon of honey, and a half teaspoon of sea salt. I doubt it’s making me any healthier, but it tastes great.) There’s also a “Sleep Sounds” discovery, with seven one-hour tracks of ambient music that are really wonderful for drifting off to sleep. I also enjoyed “Yoga for Running,” a series of five-minute sessions you can do before heading out for a jog. If that’s not your speed, try “Yoga for Bedtime.” I do have a few gripes, but just a few. You can’t see what’s in a discovery without downloading it and setting reminders, although it’s easy enough to do that, take a look, and then delete it. The exercise videos also don’t have music and don’t play nicely with third-party music apps; I put on some throwback tunes while I did the HIIT workout but Spotify paused every time the timer dinged. So I had to work out in silence. The best part about the app, though, is its laid-back approach. Did you let the week pass by without finishing your three sessions? All Day will ask if you’d like to keep it on your schedule for another week. And the process of signing up for a discovery involves setting reminders: you choose when and how often, but you can’t start the program until you choose something. Then the app will remind you when it’s time to do the thing you said you were going to do. It’s almost like they know I have a short attention span. Source
