The first week of my new Freeletics strength coach is over and I want to do a quick review. Compared to my former cardio & strength coach the first week was not that hard, but maybe after a hellweek everything seems to be easy. The coach gave me the following exercises (see image below). It was a little bit to much cardio for my taste, but a little running never killed nobody.  I have not been running for a while and the 8km gave me burning legs for two days, in that time I did only upper body exercises and continued with the Hyperion when my legs were ok again.

Strength coach week 1

All of the exercises were a little bit different, than I knew them. Zeus (Standard) now has 5 more repetitions of each exercise, running is completely new, Hyperion was the Endurance version, not really tough. Only Metis was the same, Iris was only in the 1/5 version what means, that between the two 1km runs there is only one of the former 5 sets of 100 Jumping Jacks and 100 Climbers.

The volume of 4 workouts per week was ok, as I said the hellweek last week kind of brought me to a new level, so it seemed to be a little to easy. The new exercises that replaced the max workouts are perfect for filling up those gabs between workouts when they were to easy for you. So I did some extra pull-ups, burpees, squats and sit-ups after the regular workouts.

After completing the week, the coach gives the opportunity to evaluate the weak and change the settings for the next week. You can either say it was way to easy, hard but ok or way to hard. I choose way to easy because of all the extra exercises I did.  Other settings you can make are the volume settings (how many workouts per week) and the muscular limitation, in case you hurt yourself or just want to train a special part of your body.In general the new update brought some major changes to the Freeletics Experience.

Workouts, Exercises, Running – the tripod of the new Freeletics experience

Apart from the warmup and stretching routines I wrote about in the previous post there are the following new features.

New Exercises
Exercises are the elemental parts of the workout, like Burpees, Pushups or Situps. In total there are now around 39 Exercices available (excluding running). Some are new at all, some are just the former modified version of known workouts that have now a name. For example “Pikes” was the former modified version of Handstand Pushups. Exercises are clustered in Endurance, Standard and Strength exercises witch you can choose depending on your training fokus. There are no more MAX workouts, instead you can choose how many reptitions of an exercise you want to do in a range from 10 -2000 or for distance based exercises like frogs the max distance with a range from 1 x 10m to 2 x 1km.

New Running
Running is a complete new feature in beta version that introduces a nike+ like user interface. You can choose a distance and see the route you are running an a map. A really good feature is the “turning point” where the App tells you when you reached half of your distance and it is a good time to turn. This feature anyhow is not included into the workouts, so if you do an Iris, where there is a 1km run at the beginning and the end, there will be no map and no distance measuring, but maybe this is comming later.

New Workouts
Every Workout is now available in three different manifestations (like exercises) Endurance, Standard and Strength and in different intensity. Different intensities are only available with the coach I gues, they can not be choosen from the Workouts section. Here you can see the differences between endurance, standard and strength version of a workout.

Ares Endurance version

Ares Standard version

Ares Strength version

In summary, the new coach has a lot more different workouts and so is much more individualizable. I thought it was a little bit to much cardio focused but the second week looks much better. After the next week I will take another picture to see if there is any visible progress. Keep going, never give up and stay updated 🙂