Top 5 Health & Fitness Apps

Managing our diet and exercise is becoming much easier thanks to the growth of health and fitness apps. There is no excuse for not keeping on top of things when you have an app to tell you what exercise to do and how many calories you can have in one day. No matter what your exercise goals are, there will be some sort of app that can help you along the way to achieving them and can help you change your unhealthy habits and keep you focused.

So what sort of apps are out there at the moment? We have selected a range of different apps that can help you with different things such as diet, exercise and goal setting.

'Gym - treadmill and other equipment' by Wootang01

1. Find Healthy Food - GoodFoodNearYou

This app is completely free and it is ideal for people who travel a lot. Have you ever been on the road or in a city you don’t know and found it impossible to find healthy food? This clever app searches for healthy food near your location and highlights fast food, restaurants and supermarkets within your vicinity. This helps you to make a sensible decision about what to eat and provides you with a lot more choice.

Not only does it pick out potential places to eat but when you tap on them it brings up a range of nutritional information. It will tell you the carb, fat and calorie totals of each item. Once you have decided on the best place to eat you can use the map to help you get there.

2. Exercises – iFitness

This app costs $1.99, but this is a fairly low price compared to some other paid fitness apps and is definitely worth the small investment. It’s a very popular paid fitness app with over 230 exercises to try out and you can select an appropriate exercise by choosing an area of the body or muscle group to focus on.

What’s great about this app is that it doesn’t just list exercises; it has 100 videos giving you precise instructions and guidance. You can also get access to 12 routines made by fitness experts. Log each workout and track your weight using graphing technology so you can see how you are improving.

3.Training and Food Diary – Lose It

This is another free app you should get your hands on. This app helps you to combine your food diary and workouts into one overall health programme. Being strict with yourself and putting in all your details can be a bit frustrating but it is definitely worth it to get the results. This app has an extensive list of different foods under easy to read categories such as chicken, tea, fruit and vegetables. It logs the nutritional value of each of these foods including fat, protein, calories and carbohydrates.

It also lets you input your daily exercise including how many hours you spent doing exercise and the intensity. This enables it to calculate roughly how many calories you burnt off against what you have already eaten, so you know how many calories you are allowed to consume for the remainder of the day. There is also a graph to show how much eight you have lost, which really helps you to see your progress.

4.Motivating - RunKeeper

Those who love to get out in the great outdoors and go on walks, runs, hikes and bike rides will love this helpful app. It is a motivating app that tracks your exercise and displays information about your progress. It uses the GPS on your phone to track your location and how far you manage to go. You can then look back at stats on each run and compare them to your best performances. The app also gives you the option of setting goals and providing voice coaching to help you reach them as well as customisable training plans and integration with other helpful websites.

5.For Complete Beginners - Couch To 5K

This is the perfect app for beginners who want to start getting fit. It won the 2012 Appy Award because of its ability to help less active people get started on their journey to getting fit. The app claims to be able to get even the laziest people to be able to run a 5K race in nine short weeks. It also has a 10k option for those who want more of a challenge. It uses graphs to track progress and virtual coaches to help encourage beginners.