Health and Fitness Phone Apps

Technology is ever improving and can be an excellent way to make exercise and weight loss fun! If you burn more energy than you consume, theoretically you will lose weight. A great way to monitor daily nutrition and exercise and add enjoyment is to make use of some of the fantastic technology that is available, more specifically phone applications. They will act as an additional motivator and help provide encouraging feedback on your daily nutrition and exercise. Additionally it is a great way to connect with friends, share your progress and get some helpful tips and ideas.

My Fitness Pal

Weight loss can be a tricky process, especially trying to monitor your food intake with all the different ingredients included in products these days. This user friendly app makes nutrition fun and easy! Firstly My Fitness Pal is made individual as it requires your personal details, measurements, goals and allows you to keep track of your daily energy count, even updating you on your remaining daily energy. Another added bonus is you don’t have to worry about typing in lists of different ingredients, you can simply type your product into the application or even scan the barcode. My Fitness Pal also allows you to add your daily cardiovascular and strength exercise.

Azumio Instant Heart Rate

This is a cheap and easy way to keep track of your exercising heart rate! Prior to beginning, this app will require your personal details and measurements to help individualize your heart rate zones and more importantly your ultimate fat burning zone. During cardiovascular exercise, fat is predominantly utilized at 65-75% of a person’s theoretical maximum heart rate. This application is user friendly and for a heart rate reading you simply place your finger over your smartphone’s camera. Cheap and Easy!

Run Keeper

This phone application is a walker/runner’s best friend and will make your exercise that little bit more fun. Ever got home from a run and wanted to know how far you travelled and how fast you were going? If that is the case then Run Keeper will be your new exercising partner. This application acts as a GPS unit and will provide information including speed, distance and keep track of your route travelled. This great application additionally allows you to share your progress with your friends on facebook and additionally get some great ideas for new exercising routes.

You Are Your Own Gym

Resistance training is an important contributing factor to assisting weight loss through exercise. Research has shown that an increase in muscle mass, through resistance training, is heavily linked with increasing a person’s resting metabolic rate. The problem with resistance training is knowing what exercises to perform, how to perform them and how to add variation to your program. This application provides a variation of body weight resistance training exercises that require no equipment and place them in an easy to follow structured, timed program. If you are new to resistance training or don’t have much time to exercise, this application will make strength training fun and easy.

Runtastic Pedometer

This is a very simple application that will allow you to keep track of your daily steps and see if you are getting close to the recommended 10,000 steps a day. This is a reliable application that you can keep in your pocket, bag or purse. Other helpful exercise phone applications:

• MyWod – Crossfit (guide)
• iSmoothRun (GPS tracker)
• Fitocracy (motivational app)