We live in a technology driven time. Many of you have probably felt frustrated in the past when you find out there isn’t an app to make some daily task easier. When it comes to fitness, there are a plethora of apps out there to help you track, train, and compete with your friends! In fact, the android platform has reached 158,000 health-related apps, surpassing the number of health apps in the Apple app store. That is a lot of apps to choose from so we are going to give you a breakdown of some of the best fitness apps out there.
*We would just like to point out that when researching for this post that Pokemon Go, a popular app that had users of the app hunting pokemon around the world, was included in the top rated FITNESS APPS.*
Moving on…
To kick off our list of great fitness apps we present to you StickK! It is a great app for tracking habits and holding yourself accountable to those habits. The app was developed by behavioural economists at Yale University and is trying to take habit tracking one step further than just checking off a colour-coded-box on the calendar. The app asks you to make a commitment contract upon signing up and you can even bet money on yourself! As you progress through your habit tracking experience, you can choose friends to hold you accountable to your goals and help keep you motivated on those days when you can’t find the motivation within yourself.
If you haven’t already heard of MyFitnessPal, it is the one of the most downloaded health and fitness apps across all platforms. This nutrition tracking app has a massive database of foods, allows you to scan barcodes to log food, will track exercise and water, provides health related articles, and can even give you a macro and calorie break down based on your goals. The app is free but is available in a premium format for $8/month. The premium version allows you to set macro goals by grams (free version is by percentages only), you can customize your food journal, and receive more stats about the way you are eating. If you are looking to get a better sense of your caloric intake or macro breakdown this is a great app.
One of the downfalls of this app is that their multipliers can over and underestimate calories. The exercise multiplier (ie. the formula that calculates how many calories you burned working out) cannot take into account your individual metabolism, so it could give you a much higher or a much lower number then what you actually burned. The calorie requirements that they produce for various goals are massively underestimated. If you have any friends who have used the app to lose weight you probably heard them say they needed to eat 1200 calories. Growing children need 1500 calories to just help them grow and be healthy, so an adult who is working and exercising should not try to be limiting themselves to 1200 calories a day. It really is not sustainable. Your best bet it to find how many calories you can eat that gives you energy, supports recovery, and keeps you feeling sane.
This app is great for tracking your workouts. You can group exercises into circuits, you can copy old workouts so you are consistently getting better at certain movements, and the app even gives you extra data like PR’s for specific exercises, graphs of your strength progress, and you can even track your body metrics within the app.
Adding new exercises can be a bit tedious, but for a free app, this app is a great tool to include in your training.
The Nike training app is a great way to get your workout in when you don’t feel like doing any of the thinking. The app coaches you through a workout so you can just put your headphones in, press play and get a pretty good workout in. This app is great for those of you looking to fill in the gaps in your training schedule, are travelling and need bodyweight workout to get you sweating, and is great for beginners.
The only thing we can say about this app is that many of the technical movements are included in the workouts and so you have to be monitoring your form yourself. If you have never been coached through a squat, deadlift, push-up, pull up, or plank, we recommend you do so before trying the workouts. You can also start the app, but no one is holding you accountable to finish the workout, so for those of you who struggle with staying motivated to workout, this style of training may not be right for you.
This really takes the cake for best fitness app. While there are apps like Pact and DietBet that pay/reward you for winning at weight loss and other fitness challenges, Charity Miles rewards your activity by donating to charity. All you have to do is sign in, make an account and get moving! The money comes from a corporate sponsorship pool so all you have to do is move in order for others (and yourself) to benefit! Some of the charities you can choose from include ALS Association, WWF, Girl Up, Pencils of Promise, ASPCA, and Stand Up to Cancer.
Apps can be a great way resource for you whether you are just starting your fitness journey or you have been doing this for years. Try one of these apps and let us know how it worked for you!
