Top 5 Health and Fitness Apps

Starting a healthy diet and fitness routine is hard. 

Maintaining that routine for weeks, months, and hopefully a lifetime can be even harder. While finding a support group of family and friends is extremely helpful and ideal, they can’t be with you every second of every day to make sure you’re staying on track.

Luckily, technology can be (and probably already is) by your side 24/7, and there are a bunch of great apps that can help you with every aspect of your health journey. 

Here’s a list of the top five health and fitness apps you can use to keep you on track and dedicated to your diet, exercise, and even sleep routines.

1. MyFitnessPal: iOS, Android, Windows – Price: Free

 

The MyFitnessPal app is the mobile version of MyFitnessPal.com, a comprehensive diet- and exercise-tracking site where you can connect with a large community of people who are also dedicated to their health. 

After creating an account, you can easily set custom or recommended goals for calories, macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates, and fats), micronutrients (such as vitamin and fiber intake), and more based on your height, weight, and fitness level. MyFitnessPal has an enormous database of nutritional information for almost any food you can think of, verified by the users of the site. 

You can also track your workouts and weight, so it’s easy to look back after all your hard work and see how far you’ve come!

2. Zombies, Run!: iOS, Android – Price: $3.99

Who says running can’t be fun? For all intents and purposes, Zombies, Run! is a game. 

It is a compilation of audio recordings, including radio announcements, that you listen to on a run, all explaining how the zombie apocalypse is happening RIGHT NOW, and you are the only one who can save the world. In more than 35 missions, not only are you running to get away from the zombies, but to collect supplies for the survivors back home. The further and faster you run, the more people you can save. 

The app also allows you to listen to your own music playlists in between announcements, and tracks the time and distance of your runs.

3. Full Fitness: Exercise Workout Trainer: iOS – Price: $1.99

This app is a must-have for anyone who is serious about lifting. Full Fitness provides explanations for hundreds of exercises, including video instruction, a logging feature so you can keep track of your sets, reps, and weight for each exercise (great for keeping you motivated!), and even a stopwatch timer for timing your rest in between sets. 

Not sure what routine to follow? Full Fitness has 30 pre-made routines according to certain fitness goals, like weight loss, strength, or even achieving definition of certain muscle groups.

4. Lift–Your Daily Coach: iOS, Android – Price: Free

Lift isn’t specifically a health app, but it can be immensely useful when trying to create a new habit. It is a community of coaches and people with the same goals as you, all focused on working together to achieve those goals. Besides being able to ask advice of any of the users, for an additional $14.99, you can turn on in-app coaching to get 1-on-1 advice from an expert in the field. 

Daily notifications keep you focused on your goal, as do tracking your little (and big!) accomplishments. Use Lift to lose weight, get fit, eat healthy, or even just become a happier, more productive person.

5. SleepCycle: iOS, Android – Price: $0.99

One very important aspect of health and fitness that most people overlook is sleep. Without adequate amounts of quality sleep, your body and mind have difficulty fully recovering, and your performance in the gym and the office can suffer. 

SleepCycle tracks and analyzes your sleep patterns based on your movement while you’re asleep. It can then determine when you are in your lightest sleep phase, which is the best time to wake up; if you’re woken up by an alarm during deep, REM sleep, you wake up feeling groggy. SleepCycle’s alarm (which you set as a 30-minute window) will only wake you up when you’re only lightly sleeping, giving you the quality sleep you need to fully recharge. 

It also gives you a detailed report of your night’s sleep, including time asleep, percentage of quality sleep, and a chart of your sleep patterns.

Have you used any of these apps before? (You all know I am obsessed with MyFitnessPal!) What do you think of them? Let me know by emailing me at katy.hajzer@gmail.com. 

Lift. Eat. Love. Sleep.