Our Take on the Best Health & Wellness Apps
If you are trying to be more physically active or just increase your daily steps, fitness apps can really make a difference and help build healthy habits. With such an abundance of fantastic apps available, and so many newbies entering the market, we thought we’d share our favourites for keeping on track.
Love to go for a run, walk, or hike? You’ll get a clear view of your training in real-time with RunKeeper which not only tracks activity but encourages you to get active more often. Have a race, weight, or pace in mind? The My Plan dashboard provides custom training plans based on your answers to a series of questions, or there are ready-made schedules that can be selected. You can build, save, and discover new routes with GPS to keep your workout stimulating. Join challenges, snag workout rewards, participate in virtual races, and share achievements with your friends. This app gives you heaps of stats and feedback, tracking your average mins/km, time elapsed, calories burnt, total km/mi and current pace. RunKeeper also allows you to select specific playlists from your phone and provides you with audio cues as you progress through your run, making it an awesome pocket run coach.
Love a workout with friends? You might join Strava for the app’s tracking ability, but you will stay for the competition and motivation of the community, which involves millions of cyclists, runners, active adventurers, and pros that record their activities. Strava’s activity tracking provides key statistics such as speed, pace, distance, elevation gained, and calories burned during and after exercise. An interactive map of your activity is also displayed.
You can compare your performance with other users (nothing like a bit of healthy competition), share pictures and other highlights of your activity, and give comments and kudos to the people you follow.
This app is well known for a reason. Couch to 5K helps you go from couch potato to running 5K in just 9 weeks by following their easy and fun training plan. The app is designed for complete beginners to spend around 20 to 30 minutes working out, three times per week, to get 5K ready.
The race training tools allow you to log your workouts, including distance and pace progress, and share progress on Facebook.
A choice of four interactive, motivating virtual coaches help you to stay on track, while audio cues guide you through each workout. The app syncs with your phone’s playlists so that you can listen to your favourite tracks while running.
Keen to make a difference? Charity Miles will let you do that for yourself – and others. Earn money for charities every time you run, walk, or bicycle by using the free Charity Miles app. Corporate sponsors agree to donate a few cents for every mile you complete. Choose the charity you support (from more than 40 at the time of publishing) and hit the road – in fact, invite a few friends along to join you, so you can really get those $ adding up. Users of the app have already raised more than $2 million for charity.
Your activity, distance, duration, and the total amount earned by the community for your chosen charity is displayed on the dashboard, motivating you to increase your fitness and improve your health as well as earning more for your chosen charity “Every Mile Matters.”
MyFitnessPal is the leading resource in nutrition tracking and provides a wealth of tools for tracking what and how much you eat, and how many calories you burn through activity. It’s easy to use and comes with an extensive database of foods and drinks with nutrition facts on more than 2,000,000 foods!
Trying to weave a bit more mindfulness into your life? Calm is your meditation go-to. Learn the basics, get access to guided meditations and customise the meditations to your specific needs, whether your goal is to reduce anxiety or just learning to take time out from the busyness of your world.
This music streaming app specialises in DJ created mixes that maintain a consistent beat. You can browse mixes by genre, DJ or type of workout eg spin, yoga, or running. Get those feels.
Sleep is critical to our health. Adequate sleep is a key part of a healthy lifestyle and can benefit your heart, weight, mind, and more. But waking out of sleep plays an important role too! The sleep phase you are in when your alarm goes off is critical for how tired you will feel when you wake up. This app tracks your sleep cycles and makes sure it wakes you during your lightest one to minimise grogginess, exhaustion and that bleary oh-no-is-it-morning-already feeling.
Of course, the most important tool of all is YOU and your dedication to your fitness and wellbeing. If these apps can give you a little motivation, then make the most of them!
