Tabata Timer and HIIT Timer 12+

Tabata for Body Building

I am 61 years old and I build and sculpt my body. I have been working out regularly during this phase of life for at least six years. I started with standard body parts or muscle group exercises, with dumbbells, bands, cables and free weights. I have always felt the need to WORK and not waste time between sets and as my routine evolved, I moved to interval training using an electronic timer. I saw a vast improvement and found out about the Tabata method, began employing it for body building movements and vigorously improved stamina and muscle growth. I keep a training log and take pictures regularly. Now, I am not Arnold, nor do I want to be- but I want to be healthy, mobile, and ripped. This Tabata app works great. For phone and Bluetooth use, it does the trick.

Easy to use, but not perfect

I started using this app for home workouts when I couldn’t make it to the gym. I prefer group fitness classes, so home workouts need to be shorter with more intensity for me to be motivated to do them. That being said, for the few times that I AM motivated to work out at home, using this app (along with my own list of exercises that target what I want to work on) gives me the structure to get it done. However, the “rest” periods between exercises are also right before the 1-min recovery between sets, which is confusing if you don’t know that beforehand or don’t really know how Tabata works. Also,
they put a 1-min recovery period after the last set, which is then followed by the cool down period; again, this is fine if you know Tabata format and just think of it as a longer cool down but can be confusing if you’ve never done Tabata before. I haven’t played with it enough to see if I could eliminate the extra “rest” periods before recoveries or the end recovery before the cool down, so maybe that’s somewhere in the settings that I didn’t see. However, for a basic timer to get you through a workout, this works for me.

Features in pro version don’t work

Useful timer but fairly basic with limited ability to customize functions such as the timing of alerts. Most alerts are also somewhat obnoxious, they would do well to include a selection of clear, identifiable alerts that are more subdued. I do have a gripe. I paid for the pro version after using the basic. The improvements were minor. Which I suppose is what it is. HOWEVER many of the functions flat out don’t work or function improperly interfering with basic features. For instance, the option for a tone three seconds prior to the end of an exercise repeats itself with one second to go. There are similar problems with other functions. There appears to be no option to increase the sound volume on voice announcements relative to music playing simultaneously. There is a function to reduce (or turn off?) music volume during voice announcements BUT IT DOESN'T WORK. In conclusion this is a good basic interval timer that is a few tweaks away from being awesome. Which suggests to me that the designers don’t care / they just want folks to buy the pro version. I hope they prove me wrong by fixing the “broken “ functions first, then improve customizability.

Developer Response ,

Hey, this is not true at all. All intervals are completely customizable and can go from 0 seconds to 90 minutes. You are also able to select the number of sets and cycles to completely customize your Tabata workouts.

You can turn any of the beep alerts on or off and select more mellow sounds if you find the defaults a little too harsh. The voice alerts are also selectable and tuneable under the Announce settings.

Also, every single ONE of the Pro features WORKS. The 3 second tone that you point out is not a part of Pro features at all. It also sounds on all 3 of the last 3 seconds 3..2..1, though it does work best if you select a shorter beep sound that is a second or less.

We are unable to control device volume as iOS does not allow it and play everything at device volume. We do have an option to pause music during announcements and beeps and it's one of our most popular features that works great.

We are also happy to help with the problems you describe and it would be great if you could send us a short video of these issues. Very happy to help with them. We are on support@parabolicriver.com for more.

If you are not happy you can also get a refund for the app via iTunes support.