Three Fitness Apps I Use Every Day
I use apps for everything from getting free stuff to making extra income . I also use them to help me on the health and fitness journey I’ve been on for the past year and a half. I’ve always been active — teaching spin classes , riding my Peloton all the time, and always going to the gym — but something really grabbed hold of me in late 2023 and made me want to get super active . Naturally, I downloaded every app I thought would help me as I started tracking my protein intake, creating the perfect workout split schedule, and tracking all of my biodata. Here are the ones that really helped me.
For Cardio: Peloton App
You don’t need a Peloton Bike, Tread, or Row to take advantage of the Peloton app I wrote about earlier . For about $24 a month, you can access cycling, rowing, and running classes that work great on non-Peloton equipment, as well as walking , yoga, stretching , and even meditation classes. I follow them all the time, whether I’m walking outside, running on the treadmill at the gym, or just sitting in my living room, since the app works not only on my iPhone but also on my Roku.
I like this app so much more than having to always come up with my own cardio routine or follow a random fitness influencer – the variety is huge and the instructors are so professional. With a well-known brand comes expertise and some confidence that you are actually getting useful, effective and safe instructions. The instructors’ cues are always clear and straightforward, new classes are uploaded every day, and I feel like I get so much more out of it than if I just hopped on a rowing machine and did it when I felt like it.
For strength training: Strong
Peloton also has a Strength+ app that I really like, but if I had to choose between that and Strong as my favorite weight-lifting companion, I’d go with Strong. The app is available on iOS and Android , and it’s relatively simple, which is why I like it. It tracks my lifts by letting me input the exercise I’m doing, the weight I’m using, how many sets and reps I’m doing, and whether I’m doing a drop set or going to failure. It then tracks all of that information, so the next time I go to do, say, a lat pulldown, Strong tells me how many reps and sets I did last time and what weight I used.
I used to track this information in a note on my phone, then transfer it to a spreadsheet when I got home. It was incredibly inefficient. Strong tracks my workout frequency, connects seamlessly to my Apple Health, and comes with extra features I don’t even use, like a tab for recording the circumference of different body parts as they grow and change ideally. I’m happy to pay $29.99 a year to unlock unlimited custom programs, but you can use the free version if all you want is to record a few details about your workouts.
For nutrition: Lifesum
I’m a millennial woman and, as such, have spent my time in the trenches of MyFitnessPal for over a decade. The app has had my generation in its clutches for far too long, and a few months ago I finally broke free when I switched to Lifesum. It felt like a whole different world.
MFP had and still has many features that nutrition professionals and eating disorder advocates consider a little dangerous , like a pop-up notification telling you how much you’ll weigh in five weeks if you consistently eat the same amount of calories as you did that day, and numbers that turn red when you exceed your daily calorie goal. Lifesum on iOS and Android is much more gentle and focused on whole-food nutrition rather than a simple calorie-based model. When I exceed my daily calorie goal, there are no red numbers to make me feel bad; the pastel rainbow background is as calming and encouraging as it is on a day when I’m eating at my goal.
When you sign up for Lifesum, you take a quiz to get a “life score,” and the app asks you how much you tend to eat from different categories like seafood and fruit. You set macronutrient goals, activity goals, and calorie goals, but the app doesn’t push you if you don’t hit them on a given day. You don’t get rewarded for maintaining a “streak.” It’s all so nice that it actually encourages me to use it, which is hardly a challenge because Lifesum gives you a lot of use cases: I have a widget on my phone that lets me enter my water intake and track my macronutrients without opening the app, I can use the camera lens as a barcode scanner or take a picture of my food and let the app estimate the calories, or I can type what I ate into the AI chat box (as best it can) and let the app estimate my calories and nutrients based on that. My Apple Health data, including my workouts and my weight, is entered for me, and Lifesum adjusts my recommended doses based on that information and the goals I set. It’s $99.99 per year, $29.99 every three months, or $7.49 per month.
Other Considerations for Phone-Based Fitness
I like to let my phone and other devices do most of the work for me when I can, so I wear my Apple Watch all the time, which sends data about how much I walk, stand, move, sleep, and generally exert myself straight to my Apple Health app, which in turn distributes that information to Lifesum and my other apps. I also use a smart scale to weigh myself, and it also sends the information to Apple Health for distribution. You can certainly get too caught up in tracking your own progress and fitness , so I only recommend getting these devices if you can exercise reasonable caution, but overall, being able to track and access data without having to do too much is really helpful. Here are the scales I use and like:
All of this is to say that you don’t want to spend too much time fiddling with your phone, especially while eating or when you’re at the gym. The apps above aren’t time-wasters; Lifesum, in particular, is super fast thanks to its barcode scanner and image-rating capabilities. However, don’t get so caught up in tracking and scheduling that you neglect the actual eating or exercise. An easy solution here is the Steppin app , which works with your phone’s pedometer and locks down pre-defined apps, only allowing you to access them if you’re willing to sacrifice the time you earn walking. If you find yourself spending too much time poring over your nutrition app or scrolling through fitness influencers’ pages without actually following the exercises they show you, Steppin can provide a happy medium by disabling access to your app and encouraging you to take steps.