Some of our Favourite Fitness Apps to keep you moving!
It seems like there are always new and shiny “techy” things coming out that promise to “Hack your Health” and make it easier for you to get fit, lose weight and get you results. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, the only way to achieve those things relys on YOU, and not some magic App on your phone.
Let’s break it down to its simplest form.
- Practice clean eating – which is eating healthy foods with healthy portions. This will lead to automatically consuming lower calories of high quality.
- Stay active. This means moving your body to increase your heart rate into a safe range for you. By doing this on a consistent and regular basis (3-5x/ week), you will help your body get stronger, and your body will burn calories in the process.
As easy as this sounds, not everyone can always stick to the plan, or find and maintain the motivation to achieve the results with their health that they are after. That’s where the technology can come into play and help you stick to your plan, track your progress, motivate you and add some variation and fun into your health and fitness routine!
This week we will be discussing 5 of our favorite Apps that we have used over the last few years and share with you who they would be good for and how they have helped us!
- Nike Training Club- this app was introduced to us by one of our patients 3 years ago and has evolved nicely over time. Features include an information feed on health and fitness topics, a tracker that tracks how many workouts you complete on the app, and it tracks total minutes of exercise completed by day/week/month so you can easily see how often you are putting in the effort. But the best part of this app is it gives you workouts designed by professional trainers and athletes, customizable fitness programs, sharing capabilities to compare your progress with others, and an easy to use interface.
To select a guided exercise session, you customize it by choosing:
- Level- Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced
- Duration – anywhere from 5 mins to 60 mins
- Equipment- select No Equipment workouts, basic equipment, or full gym
- Intensity- Low, moderate, high
- What you want to Focus on- Mobility, Endurance, or Strength
If you are a beginner, that has 20 mins to do some exercise at home with no equipment and you want a low intensity program that focuses on Mobility, the app will give you a choice of 9 workouts to choose from!! Free on iOS and Android.
- My Fitness Pal- this app was introduced to us by our Naturopathic consultant, Dr. Cowan. This app has been on the health and fitness scene for 13 years and is still a top rated app. The app has loads of features, an online community, and lots of motivational tools. The best feature of the app is an easy to use food tracker- it’s database contains over 6 million foods to easily allow you to track anything you put in your body! The database contains anything from Starbucks coffee to protein bars to homemade lasagna, thanks to a cool recipe calculator. You can set goals related to exercise and diet, weight loss goals and you can sync your activity tracker to the app too! So no more counting calories, just input whatever you eat or drink and the app will show you how you are doing! Free on iOS and Android.
- Runkeeper- this app is a favourite of Coach Jason here in the clinic. As an avid runner, this app tracks his distance, elevation, speed, and allows him to compare workouts. It puts all of your run stats into graphics so you can easily so how you are doing and track your progress towards your goals. Runkeeper also has personalized routines and running plans that fit your fitness level and busy schedule. It will also remind you when you have a scheduled run coming up! So no excuses.
- Daily Yoga- this app keeps Yoga exciting! There are over 50 Yoga classes available for viewing in HD video. Each class has a specific focus to fit what you are looking for. For instance, you may be interested in flexibility, or increasing core and trunk strength. They have it all for you. There is even a library of 500 different Yoga poses for you to test yourself on. Available on iOS and Android.
- Slopes- for the skiers and snowboarders out there, you might like this app. It is a simple tracker of how many runs you have done in a day, the total vertical skied, total distance covered and total time on the slopes. It also has a trail map of pretty much every ski hill in North America! One cool feature is it gives you a lifetime vertical of all the skiing you have done with the app. This is very cool!
Honorable mentions:
- Headspace- for meditation and breathing
- fm- for focus, relaxation and sleep
- Map My Walk, Map My Run, Map my Ride- activity trackers for walking, running and cycling.
- Strava Run and Strava Ride- activity trackers for running and cycling.
Well there you have it! There are tons of fitness, health and meditation apps out there! These are some of our favorites and hope you have some fun trying them out. Don’t forget that NO app can replace the time, effort and discipline it takes eat clean and get active! Until next time, keep moving!
