Getting fit no longer requires a pencil-and-paper workout plan or a hardback diet book. The latest apps can aid your fitness goals through interactive features, instant stats and tips.
If you want to monitor or track your fitness and diet goals, using your smartphone is an ideal way to do it. Because your smartphone and apps are always with you, they are a constant reminder to check in on your progress, stay the course, and keep your motivation up. Whether you're trying to lose weight, or walk more steps in a day, or make time for a fifteen-minute power workout in your living room, fitness apps can help.
If you want to monitor or track your fitness and diet goals, using your smartphone is an ideal way to do it. Because your smartphone and apps are always with you, they are a constant reminder to check in on your progress, stay the course, and keep your motivation up. Whether you're trying to lose weight, or walk more steps in a day, or make time for a fifteen-minute power workout in your living room, fitness apps can help.
We scoured every app market for standouts that were pushing the boundaries of health and fitness, and we sought to cover an array of interests and goals. While we definitely took popularity into consideration, we placed most of our focus for each app on these key criteria:
- Is it highly rated?
- Does it offer something totally unique?
- Is it user-friendly?
- Is it reliable and not buggy?
- Can it continue to grow and innovate?
Some of the apps highlighted here operate as tracking tools, in which you log your workouts or calories eaten, while others automate the tracking process for you while you're working out. Some are coaching apps that march you through a fitness routine, and others are a combination of all these things. The options for support and motivation are endless.
1. MyFitnessPal
(iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows)
Counting calories isn't terribly exciting, but it's a great way to really be aware of what you're eating. Couple that with a daily calorie limit and you could find yourself losing weight and getting healthier in no time. MyFitnessPal makes this easy. There are over three million items in its food database, so logging what you eat and drink is a breeze and if there's anything missing you can always create custom foods.
Plus it lets you track exercise, view progress reports and even use a barcode scanner to log food instantly. With the added perk of a cardio and strength training tracker loaded with 350 exercises. Users can enter their own recipes and calculate their nutritional contents, allowing them to keep tabs on nutrition info including calories, fat, protein, carbs, sugar, fiber, and cholesterol.
2. RunKeeper
(iOS and Android)
This app puts all your running stats (pace, distance, and time) at your fingertips in a bold format perfect for eyes “on the run.” It also organizes the data into neat charts so you can track your progress during your cooldown walk. Plus you can view stats and progress reports and get audio coaching as you go to keep you motivated.
3. Noom Coach
(Android)
With Noom you can log foods to track your calorie intake and log workouts and weight loss progress. Plus there's a pedometer feature which can track how much you walk or run during the day. Noom also puts a lot of emphasis on motivation, with health and wellness articles added daily, giving you an extra reason to launch the app.
This personalized coaching app helps you form healthy habits through daily tasks, meal logging, and exercise tracking. Log meals and workouts while the integrated pedometer counts your steps all day. The huge food database is loaded with nearly one million foods, including meals at popular restaurants and local cuisines.
4. FitStar Personal Trainer
(iOS and Android)
FitStar functions as your personalized digital training coach, adapting its exercise routines to match your physical capability, carefully calibrating workouts to be challenging without being too difficult. Users can configure their ideal exercise duration and workout goals, and the app will whip up a workout session for you. Once done, you can rate the difficulty of the workout, allowing the app to slowly learn and adapt to your workout capacity, challenging you without breaking your body.
5. Nike+ Training Club
(iOS and Android)
This app features more than 100 full-body, 15, 30, and 45 minute workouts (complete with step-by-step audio, visual, and video demos) from some of the world’s most inspirational female athletes, trainers, and celebrities.
Tailored workout programs make this app uniquely functional, regardless of your fitness goals. Whether you’re opting for a 4-week program tailored to your abilities or supplementing your regular workout sessions, this app goes above and beyond basic instructions to measure your progress in number of workouts, minutes logged, and average calories burned.
6. Runtastic Six Pack Ab Workout
(iOS and Android)
Packed with a variety of ab workouts, including a customized 10-Week Six-Pack Plan, The 7-Minute Workout, Insanity, Shape Up, and Six-Pack Junkie, this HD-video-based app produces results and allows users to track and share their progress.
Choose your personal trainer avatar and get crunching, mountain climbing, or reverse curling. As your avatar breaks down each move, the muscles they’re targeting are illuminated, so you know where you’ll feel the burn. Whether you’re customizing a 5-minute workout or gearing up for the 30-minute insane ab routine, you can amp up the motivation with music packs that match the pace of each circuit. Users can also sync workouts with Runtastic.
7. Argus Health & Calorie Counter
(iOS and Android)
Argus tracks everything—and we mean everything—24/7. The app monitors every step, stride, cycle, bite, sip, pound, snore, and more. Constantly processing your daily routine, Argus produces detailed charts that can help you make sense of numerous bio-feedback data points to reach your health goals and improve overall wellbeing.
Argus is pretty much a health diary you don’t have to remind yourself to write in. It allows you to uncover important trends in your personal health habits that you didn’t even know were there. Not only is the interface sleek and intuitive, but Argus is easy on the battery (even for a 24/7 monitor).
Cost: .
8. Fitocracy
(iOS and Android)
If it’s true that “there’s power in numbers,” then this app is one of the most powerful—especially when it comes to motivating its multitude of users via a community of dedicated fitness enthusiasts that are tracking their progress too.
Fitocracy not only introduces you to a world bustling with fitness coaches, nutrition experts, and other folks from a wide variety of fitness backgrounds; it also turns that world into a game in which you enter strength training, cardio, and nutrition challenges, gain points, and track your progress toward the ultimate goal: optimal health and fitness.
9. Human - Activity Tracker
(Android)
A casual fitness app that encourages you to take on the “Daily30”, which is exactly what it sounds like: Thirty minutes of physical activity, every day, whenever and in whatever way you want.
Walk, run, skip, gallop, dance, jump rope—as long as you’re being active for more than a minute at a time, no matter what you’re doing, Human tracks your movement and lets you know when you’ve achieved your Daily 30.
10. Map My Fitness Workout Trainer
(Android)
The app allows users to explore and manage more than 600 fitness activities, meaning virtually anyone can tailor the app to their personal routines.
Whether you’re running, rock climbing, playing tennis, or swimming, MapMyFitness records every detail of your workout, including duration, distance, pace, speed, elevation, calories burned, and route traveled on an interactive map. The app compiles and crunches this data to create a comprehensive workout history.
11. PUMATRAC
(iOS and Android)
Track distance, pace, and calories burned while analyzing your personal behaviors so you can learn how to get the most out of a workout. PUMATRAC gives an absurd amount of insight into each run. There’s even a feature that tells you which days of the week you typically run your personal best, how weather can impact your personal calorie burn, and what tunes get your feet moving fastest.
12. Lose It!
(iOS and Android)
LoseIt! is a calorie tracking app that creates a weight loss plan just for you. Plug in your goals, from pounds lost per week to overall wellness, and LoseIt! will customize a plan that fits your life.
Tracking is beyond easy with LoseIt!’s barcode scanner feature and vast food database. Plus, it makes weight management fun by allowing users to create head-to-head, team, and group-based challenges. LoseIt! also connects with a ton of other apps and devices.
13. Fooducate Weight Loss Coach
(iOS and Android)
A barcode can actually tell you a lot more about nutritional value than a food label can—at least it will with this app, which can help you make healthier choices when grocery shopping. Fooducate not only deciphers the quality of calories in a given food item, it also suggests similar yet healthier products and tracks your food intake and exercise.
14. ShopWell - Diet Scanner
(iOS and Android)
When you can’t have a personal nutritionist create your grocery shopping list, you can always have Shopwell do it. With a quick scan of a barcode, this app can determine which foods meet your dietary needs.
Shopwell personally scores each product just for you based on your age, gender, health goals, diet needs, and ingredient and nutrition preferences. Scores range from 0-100; the higher the number, the better the product is for you.
15. Calm: Meditate & Relax
(iOS and Android)
Calm offers a soothing, guided meditation app for whenever you need a break—even just a short one—from your day.
Whether you’re searching for focus, creativity, energy, confidence, or a little extra sleep, Calm offers 50 guided meditations to choose from—which you can sync with 16 soothing music tracks by meditation music master, Kip Mazuy. Plus, new content is added monthly.
16. Daily Yoga - Fitness App
(iOS and Android)
This yoga coaching app gets you through the most stressful days with dynamic yoga sessions displayed in HD videos, explained via live voice guidance, and backed by soothing music.
The step-by-step guidance is perfect for beginners. With more than 45 yoga sessions and a library packed with more than 300 poses, users can track their way to zen-filled progress.
17. Charity Miles
(iOS and Android)
For every mile you run, bike, or walk, a corporate sponsor matches your miles monetarily and donates to a charity on your behalf. Users get to experience what it’d be like to be a sponsored athlete. Hard work pays off in the form of changing the lives of people in need.
18. Workout Trainer: fitness coach
(iOS and Android)
Workout Trainer provides users with a library of workout routines, complete with step-by-step audio and video instructions to guide users through the various exercises. An interactive fitness wizard allows you to customize your experience and recommended regimen. Plus, users can create and edit their own personal workout routine.
19. JEFIT Workout
(iOS and Android)
JEFIT serve as an incredible resource for users looking to do strength training and bodybuilding. Loaded with an exercise database of thousands of routines sorted by targeted body part, it comes complete with detailed instructions, a workout planner, exercise log, progress tracker, numerous timers and options, and synchronization with your JEFIT profile.
20. Sworkit Personalized Workouts
(iOS and Android)
Tired of following along with the same exercise videos again and again? Check out Sworkit, an exercise app that mixes things up by generating personalized workout routines from its library of exercises. Simply choose your exercise style and target body regions, and the app generates a custom workout suite of training intervals that is slightly different every time to keep your workouts from going stale. In addition to the app generated workouts, you can also build your own custom routines.
We've compiled the best fitness apps for iPhone and Android so whatever your tastes there's going to be something here that works. What are your favorite health and fitness apps? Share in the comments below :)
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