If you have your sights set on improving your fitness, you’ve probably realized it’s hard to put together a clear fitness plan and track your progress without the help of a personal trainer.
The problem is that personal trainers are expensive. Fortunately, there is a solution that’s a lot less expensive, accessible to everyone, and a lot more convenient: smartphone fitness apps.
There are thousands of fitness apps on the marketplace designed to help with all types of fitness. They range from running to weightlifting apps, calorie trackers, yoga guides, meditation resources, and more.
To save you from wasting time sifting through pages of apps, we’ve listed 6 of the best fitness apps available on iOS and Android marketplaces. We split them into 3 of the best free fitness apps and 3 of the best paid fitness apps:
3 of the Best Free Fitness Apps
MyFitnessPal
Eating healthy is one of the three vital components of achieving your desired fitness targets, along with exercise and rest. Whether you’re trying to diet and lose weight, or pack on muscle. The closer you monitor what you’re putting into your body, the easier it is to track your goals.
MyFitnessPal is a food diary. It helps you record everything you eat during the day so you can monitor your calorie, fat, and nutritional intake. It has a database of more than 300 million food items, user forums, and it integrates with dozens of other fitness apps.
30 Day Fitness
30 Day Fitness provides a series of daily workouts across a 30-day period. Each day, the app tells you how many jumping jacks, chair step-ups, push-ups, and crunches to do, as well as how long to hold a plank.
It has a good range of features for a free app. All the exercises have video demonstrations, you can set reminders each day for when you should start exercising, and it tracks all the calories you’re burning.
If you’re the kind of person who needs a little motivation and wants their workouts planned out for them, this is the app for you.
Calm – Meditation and Sleep
Fitness isn’t just about physical workouts and healthy eating. You also need to take care of your mental wellness and get plenty of quality sleep to fully recover from working out. This is where Calm helps. It was the winner of the 2017 Apple App of The Year and a Best of 2018 Award winner.
The app takes you through a journey of guided meditations with soundtracks designed to enhance your quality of sleep. It also has sleep stories, videos demonstrating how to stretch and release tension in your body, and more.
You do have to upgrade to the premium subscription plan to unlock most of the content, but you’ll get a good feel for the app with the free version.
3 of the Best Paid Fitness Apps
Fitness Buddy + Gym Workout Log
Billed as “the world’s most comprehensive fitness application”, Fitness Buddy has it all. Inside the app, there’s an exercise database with thousands of exercises for home or gym workouts. Additionally, there are progressive workout plans, meal plans, and all the stats and metrics you need to track your fitness progress.
Whether your fitness goals are to lose weight, gain muscle mass, or improve on certain workouts, this app will show you how. All you have to do is put in the work.
Full Fitness: Exercise Workout Trainer
Full Fitness is one of the top-selling fitness apps of all time and is always riding high in the list of the top 10 paid apps. The app has hundreds of exercises, all clearly demonstrated. It also has a calorie tracker, the ability to build your own exercise plans, graphs and charts displaying your progress, and lots more.
The best part about this app is how easy it is to navigate. The exercises and muscle groups are broken down into categories, and the way they chart your progress makes it easy to see the areas you’re improving.
Runtastic Running Tracker Pro
Running is one of the best ways to increase your overall fitness level. It’s also one of the most inexpensive and accessible forms of exercise. All you need is a good pair of running shoes, some other running gear, and the determination to get out and push yourself.
The Runtastic appis the perfect running companion. It helps you plan out routes and sync them to your phone, record your best times, and set training goals. It even gives you tips on how to improve your running times and hooks you up with thousands of other runners using the app.
Once you choose an the best fitness app, it’s time to apply it to your workout routine. Read more about health and fitness for a well-rounded lifestyle change.