When trying to reach your fitness goals, you need to have easy access to tools that can help you reach your fitness goals. Most people enjoy using fitness apps. However, are they worth it?
Fitness apps are worth it because they enable users to reach their fitness goals. They help users monitor their diets and daily steps. They can also keep users motivated. Some apps give users workout plans that can help them reach their fitness goals.
Keep reading to learn more about the pros and cons of using fitness apps and the best free and pay-to-use ones.
Pros of Using Fitness Apps
Easy to Use
They are designed to be easy to use. Fitness app developers know that if it is hard to use a fitness app, no one will use it. If you were to type “fitness app” into your phone’s app store, thousands of results would appear. This means that most of them are easy to download.
Tracking and Monitoring Abilities
Fitness apps are designed to work with your smartphone and other smart devices to track your movements and activities. Many fitness apps monitor your heart rate, blood pressure, sleeping habits, water intake flights of stairs climbed, steps taken, calories burned, and the number of steps you take daily. Some allow you to input your food intake, which helps you track and stick to your diet.
Most of these apps also track how long and intense your workouts are. This can help you keep track of your progress towards your fitness goals.
Health and Fitness Tips
Many of these apps give users health and fitness tips that can help them reach their fitness goals. These tips are crucial for those who don’t know very much about health and fitness.
Many of these apps can also show you how to do certain exercises that can help you reach your fitness goals.
Access to Fitness Coaches
While not every fitness app has this feature, some allow users to meet or contact personal trainers or health coaches who can help them reach their fitness goals. These health and fitness coaches can also help you create a balanced diet.
However, access to health and fitness coaches through fitness apps often isn’t free.
Can Keep You Motivated
Fitness apps can help you stay motivated to workout and work towards your fitness goals. They do this by reminding you to work out and keeping track of your progress.
Fitness apps also give users challenges to work towards outside of their fitness goals.
Can Help You Meet Your Fitness Goals
Fitness apps can help you reach your fitness goals by giving you fitness plans and recommending workouts and exercises. Some allow you to input your athletic abilities and past injuries so the app can ensure the fitness plan you choose will meet your athletic abilities. This helps prevent injuries.
Cost-Effective
Most of these apps are free, although some require users to pay for a monthly subscription to use all of the features. However, these apps can be used anywhere at any time, which means you don’t have to buy a lot of expensive equipment to exercise effectively.
Cons of Using Fitness Apps
Drain on Battery
While in use, fitness apps tend to drain the battery of smart devices. This might limit the amount of time you can spend using these apps while exercising, which may hinder your ability to exercise for as long as you want.
Cost
While many fitness apps are free, not all features on free apps are free to use. Oftentimes, if you want to use advanced features or contact and work with a fitness professional, you have to pay for a monthly subscription. These subscriptions often cost between $2 and $40, which can add up over time. While the cost may be worth it if you use the app’s advanced features often, many people get these subscriptions but end up not using them regularly.
Accuracy
Many fitness apps, especially free fitness apps, aren’t very accurate. They miscount the number of steps you take, your blood pressure levels, and more. Fitness apps that claim to help you improve your form while exercising are especially inaccurate, as they often can’t accurately evaluate your form.
Repetitive
While these apps often have a lot of activities and exercises to do, they often don’t tell you about other exercises and activities that can help you improve your fitness. Also, the exercises and activities that many fitness apps have are often repetitive. This leads to you doing the same things repeatedly, which can get boring over time. If you are bored while exercising, you likely won’t want to do it often, which defeats the purpose of having a fitness app on your smart device.
Hard to Customize
Fitness apps are sometimes hard to customize even though many users want to customize the features they use. While you input your personal health information such as your weight, height, and fitness goals, you often can’t input information like your injury history and physical limitations. Instead, you have to find your limits on your own while exercising, which puts you at risk for injuries.
Teaching Abilities
Fitness apps aren’t good at teaching exercises to those who are new to exercising. Unless you pay to meet or talk to an instructor through the app, which is a service that many free-to-download fitness apps don’t make available, even to those who pay for a subscription, you will have to make do with learning how to do certain exercises based on the limited instructions the app gives. If you need a lot of instruction while exercising to do exercises properly, most of these apps won’t cut it.
Are Fitness Apps Really Worth It?
Fitness apps are worth it if you use them often. However, if you don’t use a fitness app often, paid versions are not worth it. Free apps are worth downloading because oftentimes, you can use a lot of the app’s features to help you work towards your fitness goals. While you may not be able to access all of the advanced features, the other features on the fitness app can help you on your fitness journey, even if you are new to exercising.
Most free apps are especially worth downloading because many of the features can be used without a subscription. Most people who are new to exercising or are trying to improve their fitness don’t have a lot of money to spend on the endeavor, which is why they download these apps in the first place. App developers know this, so they make it so their apps can help people reach their fitness goals for free. However, the more complicated features are often locked behind paywalls.
While you may not be able to talk to a fitness professional without paying for a monthly subscription, fitness apps can still help you reach your fitness goals. Most people find that free fitness apps are worth downloading, even if they aren’t used very often. Having a fitness app downloaded means that whenever you are interested in exercising, you can easily open the app and start. If you don’t have a fitness app on a smart device, then that is not the case.
The Types of Fitness Apps
There are many different types of fitness apps, although some have a variety of features found on more specific fitness apps. Listed below are some of the types of fitness apps.
Sleep
Some apps that focus on sleep are considered fitness apps. Many of these apps that connect to smartwatches track your sleeping patterns as well as other aspects that can affect your health. However, some apps that are considered fitness apps only track your sleeping patterns. They track when you start sleeping, wake up, and how restless or peaceful you sleep.
These apps can help you improve your sleeping habits, tell you when to go to bed, and tell you when to wake up.
Activity Tracking
Most of these apps focus on tracking your movement like your steps and GPS coordinates. These apps also tend to track your heart rate, how long you spend working out, and your oxygen levels.
Personal Training
Some of these apps are designed to be used by people who want to follow pre-recorded workouts filmed by a personal trainer. These apps can make it seem like you are working with a personal trainer and can make exercising less boring. However, these apps often aren’t free to use. For example, the Peloton app has pre-recorded workout sessions that you can follow along with. However, to view the workout sessions, you have to pay for a monthly subscription.
Nutrition
Fitness and nutrition go hand-in-hand when someone is trying to improve their fitness. Because of this, some of these apps focus on your diet and nutrition. The fitness apps that focus on your nutrition may ask how often you exercise so it can determine how many calories you burn every day.
These nutrition apps help you track your daily calorie intake and create a meal plan. Some people use nutrition apps to help them avoid foods that they are allergic to, as some can scan food labels.
Meditation
Your mental health can heavily influence your physical health, so many of these apps focus on helping you improve or maintain your mental health. Meditation apps are common and can help you reduce your stress and anxiety levels. They can also help you improve your sleep.
Best Free Fitness Apps
Now that you know that you should download a fitness app if you want to improve your fitness or have fitness goals that you want to work on, you need to find a fitness app that suits your needs. However, there are hundreds of fitness apps available to download. To help you find the best fitness app for you, I have listed some highly recommended apps below. They are all free to download, although you may need to pay to gain access to certain features.
Fooducate: The Fooducate app helps you track how many calories you consume daily and shares diet tips with you. It can also help you track your workouts and motivate you to move more often.
Joggo: If running is your preferred method of exercise, you should download the Joggo app. It is free to download, tracks how far you run, and can help keep you motivated to keep running. It also can create a customized meal plan for you.
Home Workout: This app gives you daily workout routines to follow. It is meant to be used by people who are working out at home, with or without workout equipment.
Nike Training Club: The Nike Training Club app is completely free to use. This app gives you access to wellness tips, guided meditation sessions, workout routines, fitness trainers, and fitness instructors. It also gives you healthy recipes and
Sleep Cycle: This app is essentially a sleep tracker and alarm clock. While you sleep, it monitors you so it can evaluate how well you sleep based on the sounds you make like snoring and sleep talking. It is also designed to wake you up gently, which can make you feel more awake during the day.
Planet Fitness Workouts: This app is free to download and use. It is most commonly used by those who have a gum membership to Planet Fitness, as this app makes checking in easy. However, it can also be used by those who don’t have a membership to this gym. This app has trainer-led workout classes and tells you how to use certain types of equipment.
Overall, fitness apps are worth downloading. I find that free fitness apps are best, especially if you don’t know how often you will use them. However, fitness apps that you have to pay to use can also be worth it if you regularly use them and find it necessary to access all of the features and not just the free ones. However, the fitness app that you choose to download is up to you, whether it is free or pay-to-use.