Sponsored App Review: CardioCast

CardioCast is an Android app that leverages two of the more popular parts of the Android ecosystem to help you get fit and work out in the comfort of your own home. We all know that YouTube is full of quality workout material to help up get moving at home, and with the inexpensive Chromcast it’s super-easy to get this content on to our main screens. CardioCast comes in as a bridge between the two, allowing you to easily choose videos to play on your TV and then using the sensors in your smartphone to track your movement. It’s an app that asks you to have very little equipment, doesn’t cost much and still allows you to workout in the leisure of your own home, while giving you access to a wide variety of different workouts.

To get started with CardioCast, you’ll need to make sure you have a Chromecast setup and ready to go as well as an armband to strap to your arm for best results. If you don’t have an armband for your smartphone, you can always put it in your pocket as long as it’s secure. If you have a Chromecast setup, your next step is to download Cardiocast from the Play Store. Once installed, you’ll be given an introduction to Cardiocast.

As the app will tell you, there are only a few things you need to use Cardiocast to its fullest.

You’re given a few recommended choices of workouts to get started with, but you can also take a look at a curated list of YouTube videos and add whichever ones you want.

The main point of Cardiocast is to make great use of your TV, YouTube and the sensors in your phone altogether. As you’re watching your YouTube video, your phone will be tracking your steps and such as you do your workout. This is a nice feature, especially for those that don’t have a fitness tracker. This also appears on your TV screen alongside your video as well.

To boost the accuracy of how many steps and calories you’re burning, you can add in your height and weight if you’d like as well.

CardioCast is a pretty simple app, there’s really no getting round that, but what it is is smart. Not smart like a fitness tracker, or perhaps how Runtastic is, but smart for using YouTube and the Chromecast together so efficiently. Sure, you could just use the YouTube app and find your favorite workout videos and play them like that, but CardioCast is specifically designed to track your progress and keep you moving. You won’t get that with YouTube on its own and users will take their workouts more seriously when they use a tool designed for that very purpose. I do wish that there was perhaps a way of adding videos to a list of mine for specific purposes from YouTube though. For instance, I lift a decent amount of weights, and I watch weight lifting videos on YouTube, so I’d like to add lifting videos to a playlist in CardioCast on lifting. That would be an ideal usage for me. Still, CardioCast is a fairly recent app and there’s a lot of potential here. For those without a fitness tracker and want to work out with some encouragement, this is a nice app that makes good use of existing tools available for free.

Ratings

• Speed (4/5) – CardioCast runs fairly smoothly and there’s very little waiting around here if ever.


• Features (4/5) – By utilizing some of the best things an Android user has at their disposal to help them workout, CardioCast offers a lot with minimal need for equipment and little effort to get started on the user’s end.


• Theme (4/5) – The app looks fine, but I do wish there were more to it, it feels a little barebones as of writing.


• Overall (4/5) – A simple, yet very functional app, CardioCast is a nice way of giving users the content they need to get started getting fit in their own home with little need for extra equipment or signing up to costly subscription services or anything like that.

Pros

• Perfect for fans of the Chromecast, gives them one more great use for it.


• Helps curate the mess that YouTube can be at times and gives users a quality selection of free videos to beam straight to their TV.


• For those that don’t have fitness trackers and things like that, CardioCast is a nice way of getting some feedback from how you’re doing while enjoying multi-media.


• Height and weight information can really help give you an idea of how you’re doing.

Cons

• Does feel a little basic as of writing.


• Playlist feature could help users build up a library of specific videos for things like weight training and dance fit.

All-in-all, CardioCast is an Android app that has a lot of potential and it easily brings together some of the best features available on Android; YouTube and Chromecast. By using these two parts of Android together, CardioCast gives users the ability to enjoy quality videos while also getting some feedback on their progress. It’s not as accurate as a fitness tracker, but nobody likes to workout in silence and there’s some quality videos with great direction available on YouTube. Using a dedicated app like this, users will pay more attention to getting fit than they would just using YouTube on its own, and while there’s room to grow this is a neat little app that people used to fitness videos should definitely take a look at.

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