First of all, let me say congratulations on becoming a part of the world of fitness. If you’re reading this article, hopefully you’re serious about dropping some pounds and improving your appearance, strength, endurance and overall health. You’re in for a lot of difficult challenges down the road you’ve started on, and today I’m hopefully going to make things a bit easier for you by helping you choose a good fitness app to help you along the way.
Fitness apps are a great thing, if you know how to use them. One of the most tedious aspects of exercising is actually logging your overall progress and documenting everything that goes along with it. There’s quite a bit of math involved if you want to get serious about changing your fitness and dietary habits, and this can seriously demotivate a lot of people, even to the point where they give up on the whole thing.
To prevent this from happening to you, we highly advise you to pick up a good fitness app and let it do that part of the work for you, so that you can one hundred percent focus on the workout itself. In this article we’ll be talking about the ten best fitness apps (in our own opinion) that you can find on the market today:
1. FitBit
FitBit was primarily intended to be used with the wearable Fitbit activity tracker, but it’s since evolved into a standalone fitness app that you can use completely independently. The app utilizes the built-in sensors in your smartphone such as the accelerometer to accurately measure your steps, and can even track your walking and running routes with the help of GPS. Additionally, there’s a food log inside the app itself that you can use to effectively track your caloric and nutritional intake and build up a healthy diet plan.
2. Shape Up
This app is simply loaded with useful features, such as a running tracker, weightlifting journal and various workout guides. If you want an overall good app to help you with every aspect of exercise and nutrition, you should definitely try this one. The app is available for both iOS and Android, and best of all, it’s absolutely free!
3. Skimble Workout Trainer
Workout Trainer by Skimble is packed full of thousands of workouts that include step-by-step audio and video tutorials, so you know exactly how to perform an exercise for maximum efficiency, and without risking an unwanted injury. By utilizing the built-in app library, you can not only build up your own custom routine and share it with other people online, but you can also download custom routines that other members have provided for the community. The core version of Workout Trainer is free, although you can opt out for a Premium version, which removes ads and unlocks some additional cool features.
4. Strava Running & Cycling
If you love doing cardio, we suggest you give this app a glance.
Strava Running & Cycling is capable of tracking your distance traveled, running speed and time and so on, and then combines all this data and compares it to other people on a leaderboard. There are achievements and challenges within the app that you can use to motivate yourself to improve further, and if you own an Apple Watch with luxury Apple Watch straps or Android Wear, it can also sync with either of them and use them to provide you with additional useful information about your performance.
5. Runkeeper
Another one for you cardio fanatics out there.
This app utilizes the built-in GPS device in your smartphone to track your running, cycling or hiking progress, and also records other potentially useful information, such as your pace, total exercise time, calories burned and so on.
6. Rithmio Edge
If you already own an Android Wear smartwatch, you should definitely check out this app. Rithmio Edge can actually use your smartwatch’s built-in sensors to track the number of reps you perform when lifting weights.
Yes, you heard it; this app actually counts your reps for you, which is highly useful for those of us who simply tend to lose count in the midst of the intensity of the workout itself. That’s not all that Rithmio Edge can do, however; based on the momentum information it gets from your smartwatch, it can actually tell if you’re performing the exercise correctly, and will attempt to correct you if it realizes that your form is incorrect.
It will also track your sets and reps, your active and rest times, and everything else that you need to keep track of in order to perform a proper workout.
7. MyFitnessPal Calorie Counter & Diet Tracker
If you really want to see some serious progress with your weight loss, you’re going to have to work both on your workouts as well as your diet. With the help of MyFitnessPal, you can do both these things with a single app. MyFitnessPal includes an intuitive and simple to use calorie and nutrients counter into which you can input more than 2 million different recipes and accurately depict your entire daily nutritional balance.
8. Fitocracy
Fitocracy is a social network and fitness app in one with which users can look up certain exercise routines and log their progress to score points, gain achievements and level up their accounts. It’s an intriguing method of motivation and it seems to work quite well because you’re integrated into a community of hardworking people that constantly try to beat each other’s scores and therefore push each other beyond their limits. The app lets you automatically post your updates to both Twitter and Facebook, so you can let all of your friends know about your current progress.
9. Carrot Fit
This one is for iOS exclusively, sorry Android users!
The Carrot Fit app is an enthusiastic little app based on the popular 7-minute workout by Johnson & Johnson, but with a really humorous spin to it. Once you open the app, you’re greeted by an avatar simply called “Carrot” that will quickly initiate your first workout titled “7 minutes of hell” and run you through it, attempting to lift your spirit with funny commentary along the way.
A really cool approach to realistically one of the toughest workouts out there, so if you’re a bit of a goofball on the inside, this app is perfect for you.
10. JEFIT
The ideal app for the avid bodybuilder. JEFIT includes a massive database filled with hundreds of different exercise routines that you can use to spice up your regular workout. These routines can even be sorted by body part, so you don’t have to do any additional guesswork when you want to work on a particular muscle group. JEFIT also offers a solid progress tracking algorithm and a workout planner so you can plan out your entire routine in detail inside the app itself, which is pretty cool.
Adam Ferraresi is a successful web developer from Dallas, Texas and one of the writers of The VPN Lab and wefollowtech.com. He is twenty three years old, and when he isn’t working on some interesting new article, he enjoys listening to music and watching old movies.
