Built for HIIT enthusiasts who love competition
FREEMIUM
In our Freeletics Review we have covered the best and worst features of the workout app, making it easy for you to decide if it is the right choice for you on your fitness journey. If you want to see other great options available, refer to our home workout app review. Otherwise read on!
Contents
Features
| FREELETICS | |
|---|---|
| Use For Free | |
| Subscription Price | $34.99 |
| Minimum Subscription | 3 months |
| Beginner Friendly | |
| Advanced Users | |
| Workout Score | |
| Training Plans | |
| App Design | |
| Progress Tracking Features | |
| Community Features | |
| Workout Offline | |
| No Equipment Workouts | |
| Nutrition Features |
Pros
- Strong and aggressively themed design which looks stylish and aspirational
- Some free workouts and features mean this app is usable without subscribing
- Excellent progress tracking of workouts and leaderboards to compete with friends
- Lots of reward features help motivate you to push yourself
Cons
- Most workouts are too intense for beginners
- App design can be a little confusing making it hard to find features
- Some workouts use unconventional equipment which many users will not have at home
- Smallest subscription option is 3 months
Overview
There are two types of people who should download the Freeletics app. Those who love competition, and those who want seriously intense workouts.
The workouts in Freeletics are primarily HIIT (high intensity interval training) based, and set up in a way where you are trying to complete the sets as fast as possible. Your finish time is recorded and you are encouraged to beat it next time you do the workout. Add this to the multitude of other reward and competition features in the app (leaderboards, streak badges, challenges….), you will find yourself pushing yourself to the max in every workout!
Freeletics has gone all in on this intense competitive vibe, even the look and feel of the app is aggressive. Pictures of ripped topless men abound and the workouts are named after Greek gods.
Given the steep subscription price (freemium model with minimum duration of 3 months – a $40 commitment), we would recommend a couple weeks of trying the free content to make sure the style of workout is right for you.
The great news is the app has a good variety of workouts, leader boards, progress tracking features, and a fully fledged community notification feed (follow and comment on your friends’ workouts), so the committed will definitely get their money’s worth.
If you are motivated by competition, want HIIT style workouts and can shell out the cash, Freeletics is a fantastic app to try. Beginners might find the routines a little too intense!
Pricing, Reviews and Signup
- The app has a Freemium model. Some workout content is locked on the basic plan, and all training plans are locked.
- There is enough unlocked content available for weekly use, however regular users will want to upgrade to unlock all the workouts and the training plans.
- No free trial for the paid subscription
- The minimum subscription term is 3 months at a price of $34.99 (approximate monthly cost of $11.66)
- Refer your friend to give them a 20% discount.
- Apple App Store average rating of 4.6
- Google Play Store average rating of 4.2
- Signup is required
Workout Review
There are apps with bigger libraries of workouts than Freeletics, but that defeats the purpose of this app. You are encouraged to complete the same workout multiple times to improve your time and post a PB. Despite the smaller number of workouts there is still a range of options available to facilitate different abilities, what area of the body to focus on (lower, upper, core), and using additional equipment. One criticism of the latter is that the equipment selection is quite unconventional for home workouts and more likely to be found in the gym (ie pullup bars).
The actual workouts are tough! They are rep based and require you to touch the screen to move to the next exercise after completing the specified number of reps. Workouts are generally short in duration (we took a long session and completed it in 20 minutes), but they are very intense. Rest periods are short and sometimes non existent.
The workouts have a very limited selection of exercises in each one (a 15 minute workout might see you repeating sets of just 3 moves). While some might find this monotonous, we actually found it helps to focus on the quality of the workout rather than getting distracted with performing correct technique on multiple complex exercises.
A fun little touch is naming the workouts after Greek gods (Poseidon sounds so much better than lower ab session). There is also integration with Spotify so you can easily select your favorite workout playlist.
A surprising addition to this app is a decent running section where you can track runs. Again this is set up in a competitive format where you record PBs for various distances.
In summary, everything about these workouts are designed to encourage people to push themselves and seek a HIIT style exercise hit, a format which will make working out highly addictive for some. However, beginners may struggle and want to look for something a little less intense with more variation in the workouts
Progress Tracking and Goal Setting
An area where Freeletics excels is the progress tracking functionality. All the workouts are based around recording your time for completing a fixed number of sets and reps. You can then compete against yourself and friends to better these times. You can view historical times for a workout to track your improvement, and even race against your PB time the second time you attempt a workout.
For people who enjoy competition these are great features that encourage you to push yourself to the maximum. For us this is the stand out and most addictive part of the app.
Freeletics has lots more features based around competition and rewards. A leader board system turns getting fit into a computer game, where you ‘level up’ by earning points for completing workouts. There is also a variety of achievements to be unlocked such as multi-day streaks and total workouts completed badges.
Community and Social Features
Being able to set a PB for a workout is nothing if you can’t boast about it to your friends. Fortunately Freeletics comes packaged with a full community and social feed where you can follow and comment on friends’ workouts. You also see notifications directly from Freeletics in your feed, such as the latest HIIT based challenge or workout of the week.
Altogether the social features gel nicely into the app and create fantastic community engagement to motivate you with your workout.
Training Plans
There is a great selection of 6-12 week plans, filtered by your desired objective (stretch, cardio, build muscle etc). There are some limited edition training plans with focus on specific sports, such as cage fighting and soccer.
Unfortunately training plans are only available with a paid subscription.
Extras
Bonus material includes audio meditation guides, which is probably required after completing the intense workouts in the app. There are also some good stretching routines to help with recovery and mobility.
In previous editions of the app there used to be a nutrition section. Unfortunately this has been removed and users who want this functionality will have to pay extra to access a dedicated Freeletics Nutrition app.
FAQs
Is Freeletics good for beginners?
We wouldn’t recommend Freeletics for beginners as the workouts are seriously intense!
Is Freeletics free?
Yes, some of the content in Freeletics is available to use on a free plan. However regular users will want to upgrade to a paid subscription to unlock all the workout videos and gain access to training plans.