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Pick the dance workout app you will still be opening a month from now. For most beginners that comes down to five things: moves you can learn without a teacher, music that sets the pace, some feedback on what you actually did, sessions short enough for a weeknight, and a format that fits the room you have. Whether it counts as a workout depends less on the app than on how hard you move while it plays.
What a dance workout app has to do to count as a workout
Exercise intensity is usually described in METs. The CDC explains that "One MET equals the energy or oxygen used while sitting quietly", and that "Physical activity that burns 3 to 5.9 METs is moderate intensity." Anything at 6.0 METs or more is vigorous.
The Compendium of Physical Activities, the reference researchers use for these values, lists several entries that look a lot like a dance fitness app session:
| Compendium entry | METs |
|---|---|
| Aerobic dance, low impact, moderate effort | 4.8 |
| Aerobic dance, high impact, vigorous effort | 8.0 |
| Zumba, home video | 5.5 |
| Salsa dancing, to a video (dancing list) | 6.3 |
Most of these sit in the moderate range. High impact aerobic dance reaches vigorous, and salsa to a video lands just over the line. The two aerobic dance rows also show the catch: the same activity runs from 4.8 to 8.0 METs depending on impact and effort, and the effort is yours. Two people can follow the same routine, one marching through it and one putting in full steps, and get very different workouts. Does dancing count as exercise covers the weekly targets and what research on dance programs found.
The checklist for choosing a dance fitness app
Use this list on any app before you commit to it. None of it depends on a brand.
- Moves you can learn. Look for named, repeatable steps such as a step touch, a grapevine or a cha-cha, taught at a pace a beginner can follow. Long routines that change every few seconds are fun to watch and hard to do
- Music that sets the pace. This matters more than it sounds. A meta-analysis of 139 studies found that "Music was associated with significant beneficial effects on affective valence", which means how good the exercise feels, along with physical performance and perceived exertion. The authors also note that "No significant benefit of music was found for heart rate", so music mostly changes how the effort feels, not how hard your heart works. The best BPM for workout music covers what tempo does
- Feedback on what you did. A meta-regression of physical activity and healthy eating interventions found that "Interventions that combined self-monitoring with at least one other technique derived from control theory were significantly more effective than the other interventions". Those were behavior change programs, not apps, but the principle carries over. A dance workout app with feedback, even a simple count of what you completed, gives you something to check and something to beat next time
- Session length. Short sessions are easier to start on a tired evening. Check that you can finish one without planning your night around it
- Space and noise. A dance workout app for small spaces should let you work in a strip of floor, not a studio. If you live above someone, check whether there are low-impact options that keep jumps out
Video follow-along vs camera-scored apps
Most dance apps fall into one of two kinds, and each needs different things from you.
Video follow-along apps play an instructor and you copy them. They need a screen you can see from where you dance, which is easy on a TV and harder on a phone propped on a shelf. They are the closest thing to a class at home. The trade-off is that the app has no idea what you did. You are the only judge of whether you kept up.
Camera-scored apps and games watch you through a camera and react to your movement with points, grades or counts. Some need a console or a TV. Others run on a phone alone, using its front camera. That reaction is the feedback item from the checklist, built in. Fitness games without a console compares what the best-known options need to play, checked on each company's own pages.
Neither kind is better for everyone. If you want to learn choreography to songs you know, follow-along video is hard to beat. If you get bored without a score or a target, a camera-scored app is worth trying first.
Why enjoyment is the feature that matters most
When people ask for the best dance exercise app, they usually mean the most effective one. The research suggests the effective one is the one you enjoy while you do it.
A systematic review by Rhodes and Kates looked at twenty-four studies and found that "A positive change in the basic affective response during moderate intensity exercise was linked to future physical activity, but postexercise affect had a null relationship." In plain terms, feeling good during a moderate workout was associated with doing more activity later. Feeling good afterwards was not. These were observational links, not proof of cause, but they point the same way as the music findings above.
So when you try an app, pay attention to the middle of the session, not just the end. If you are checking the clock halfway through, that app will probably not survive your second week.
Where ShakeFit fits
ShakeFit is a rhythm workout game for your phone, and dance cardio is a large part of it. Here is how it maps to the checklist above.
- Moves. Of its 93 tracks, fifteen are Dance Pop and eighteen are Aerobics. They use steps such as the grapevine, cha-cha steps, the V step and the mambo step. Genre is a label for a group of tracks, not a promise of dance steps only: Dance Pop tracks also include jumping jacks, high knees and kicks, and some Aerobics tracks include punches
- Music. Every track is built on original music with a set tempo, and the moves land on the beat
- Feedback. You stand the phone up and the front camera follows your movement. On pose-graded moves such as the grapevine, each counted rep gets a grade word: PERFECT, GREAT, GOOD and COACH. Rhythm steps such as the cha-cha and the V step earn a reward when the camera sees you moving in time with each beat, not a grade for their form. How a rep is graded explains exactly what the camera can and cannot judge
- Guided tracks. Some tracks are follow-along lessons. You copy the coach, the camera is not used and nothing is graded. The mambo step appears in these
- A plan. Dance Kickstart, one of the three programs (Comeback Week, Dance Kickstart and Qigong Reset), works through the Dance Pop tracks from slower and easier to faster and harder. It includes jumping jacks, so pick another program if you need to stay on the floor
- Space. You need enough floor to step sideways and enough distance for the phone to see you
Two honest notes. A grade word is a game score, not a measure of effort, so use how hard you are breathing for that. And no study has tested ShakeFit itself. The research above is about music, feedback and enjoyment in general.
ShakeFit is entertainment and general fitness software, not a medical device. If you have a health condition or are new to exercise, talk to a doctor first, and stop if you feel pain or dizziness.
ShakeFit Plus adds adaptive weekly plans, long-term growth reports, custom sessions with tempo control and 5, 10 or 20-minute options depending on available movements, and full play of the 27 level 3 tracks
Questions people ask
What is the best dance workout app for beginners?
The best one for a beginner is the one with learnable steps, music you like and sessions short enough to start on a tired evening. Try two kinds before you decide: a follow-along video app and a camera-scored app. Keep the one you look forward to in the middle of a session, not the one with the longest feature list.
Do dance workout apps actually work?
They can, if you move hard enough. In the Compendium of Physical Activities, low impact aerobic dance and Zumba to a home video sit in the moderate intensity range, while high impact aerobic dance and salsa to a video reach vigorous. The app supplies the music and the structure. The effort, and whether you come back, are still up to you.
Can a dance workout app tell if I am doing the moves?
Only if it uses a camera or a motion sensor, and even then only for what it is built to judge. Video follow-along apps cannot see you at all. Camera-scored apps react to your movement, but many grade only some moves and simply reward timing on others, so read how the scoring works before trusting a grade.