Exercise Timer for Beginners

Exercise Timer is a highly customisable interval timer for Android. Fitness enthusiasts all over the world use Exercise Timer to time their daily workout routines, yoga sessions, recovery routines and much more.

If you’re here, you probably already downloaded the Exercise Timer Android app. If you haven’t you can get it on Google Play:

Getting Started

This is the main screen. It is the first screen that greets you when you open the app and it will also be your best companion during all your future workouts. Let me introduce you.

The central part of the screen shows the main timer. Exercise Timer revolves around this superb ringed interface. The outer ring indicates the total progress of your workout, while the inner ring displays the current exercise progress. The current exercise time left is also indicated inside the rings, along with the current exercise and upcoming exercises. If you have the Android Wear Watch app, this is all you need to know to perform a workout.

To start the current workout you can tap the ‘Play’ button, or anywhere in the central rings. If your finger coordination is not in the mood with all the dumbbell lifting, you can also set the whole screen to act as the ‘Play/Pause’ button from the Settings.

If you prefer to see a list of all the upcoming exercises, instead of the chic ringed interval timer, you can tap on the bottom-right list icon. It’s my personal favorite for short, fast-paced workouts where I need to know 4 steps ahead.

 

Custom Interval Timer

To create your own custom workout:

1. Open side Menu, using the Top-Left Hamburger icon.
2. Select ‘New Workout’

As you might have guessed by now, a workout is made up of multiple exercises. You can add an exercise to the list by pressing the Bottom-Right ‘+’ button. The order of the exercises can be changed by simply dragging up/down from the side grabber. Be careful, dragging left/right will delete your exercise (It will ask before).

To edit an exercise simply tap on it to open the exercise editor screen. From this screen you can rename the exercise, set its color, its duration, description and Reps. Mode (more info below). One can use the description field if the title is not enough to describe the exercise. What you write in this field will be displayed below the ringed timer, in the main screen.

The exercise duration can be set by dragging the rounded sliders. The outer slider controls the minutes, while the inner slider controls the seconds. If you prefer to use your keyboard you can tap on the duration to edit it manually.

Reps. Mode: The reps mode, short for ‘Repetitions Mode’ is ideal when you don’t know the exact duration of an exercise. For example, you might want to perform:

1. 50 Jumping Jacks
2. Run 100m
3. Indefinite break

All the above can be done using the ‘Reps. Mode’. When you are finished from the interval tap next and the workout will continue. This is like a programmed pause.

 

Grouping of Exercises

What if your workout is more complex and you need to repeat only a sub-set of exercises? For example let’s say this is your workout:

1. Warm Up
   1. Jumping Jacks x10
   2. Break 00:30
2. Tabata x8
   1. Push-ups 00:20
   2. Break 00:10
   3. Squats 00:20
   4. Break 00:10

 

With Exercise Timer you don’t have to repeatedly create the exercises inside the Tabata routine (see workout above) for 8 times. You can create a group (“Tabata”), insert the 4 exercises/breaks and simply set the laps to 8. This will save you a lot of time!

 

Online Workout Creator

If you are like me, sometimes you find the perfect workout on your desktop computer and you just want to copy it to Exercise Timer. The online workout creator allows you to create a custom interval timer on your desktop computer and then transfer it to Exercise Timer via an sms (free) or by sharing the link.