Top 5 Fitness Apps
We’re all guilty of letting our fitness habits slip every once in awhile. Thankfully, there’s an entire market of fitness apps designed to keep you accountable and make tracking your fitness a lot easier. While the realm of fitness apps is still in its relative infancy, we’ve come a long way in the past few years. Here are the top 5 fitness apps you’ll want to try out.
Google Fit
Google is slowly but surely becoming the gatekeeper of the world’s data, and their fitness app, Google Fit, is their recent entry into the fitness data field. Google Fit is a simple look at your daily fitness, centering on the amount of time you’ve been active and the steps you’ve taken during the day. A recent update of the app introduced a run-tracking mode that monitors your GPS and provides a map of your route after you’ve finished your workout. While simple, Google Fit has all the basics you need if you want to dip your toes into fitness tracking.
Apple Health
If you’re an iPhone user and you’re looking for an entry into fitness tracking, Apple’s built-in Health app will be your likely first choice. Similar to Google Fit, Health provides a fairly simple overall view of your health and fitness. What sets it apart from Google Fit, though, is a greater connectivity with other apps. Google Fit is still catching up to tie into other fitness tracking apps, but Health already allows users to include such stats as daily nutrition and allergy information.
Runtastic
Runners who are looking to graduate to a more robust run tracking app, take note. Runtastic is a clean and reliable app that tracks your runs via your phone’s GPS. Although you can get this feature in many other apps, what sets Runtastic apart is its complex breakdowns of runs. In addition, Runtastic is smartwatch-compatible, meaning that you can leave your phone at home when you go for a run.
Progression
Progression is a fairly new gym app from an indie developer, but don’t let that fool you. This is one robust app for tracking your weightlifting workouts, with an added emphasis on making goals and progressing toward them. Progression includes a ton of built-in workout routines but perhaps the best part of the app is its customizability. If there’s a workout you do that isn’t listed within its database, you can create your own.
MyFitnessPal
MyFitnessPal doesn’t track your runs through GPS or give you exercise goals to keep track of, but what it does do is track your nutrition better than any other app. The app’s killer feature is its database of user-submitted food nutritional value. So if you’re tracking calories, all you need to do is open up the app, type in your food, and MyFitnessPal will log all the information – calories, carbs, protein, and more. One of the coolest features of this app is its barcode reader; use your phone’s camera to take a picture of the food’s barcode and the app will log it automatically.
Of course, while these fitness apps are among the most popular of their kind, they aren’t the only ones out there. There are hundreds of apps that have slightly different features, and it’ll be up to you to decide what works for you. And with the growing smartwatch industry, it’s only a matter of time until we’re keeping track of our fitness from our wrists. But for now, these five apps will get you a good start to digital fitness tracking.