Fitness isn’t just an activity, it’s a lifestyle. While it can be hard to maintain a healthy lifestyle in college, many fitness and health apps, work-outs, and health plans are now literally in the palm of our hands. With the start of spring, there is no better time than now to kick-start a new fitness or health plan. To help you get started, we created a list of five easy-to-use and free health/fitness apps to help plan, set, and track goals for a healthier lifestyle!
Moves
This app is perfect for anyone looking for something easy to use. Moves automatically records any walking, cycling or running that you do and shows you the distance, duration, steps, and calories burned during your activity. The easiest thing is that the app is always on, so it is a great way to see how active you are during your whole day not just your workouts. The app is set up as an automatic diary of your life and lets you see your everyday exercise. Moves displays storylines and maps that show where, when, and how much you move. If you are looking for something a little more, Moves 2.5 for iPhone has over 60 activities you can choose from for motivation at the gym.
Lose It!
Lose It! is a great app for those looking to improve their health. Upon downloading the app, you put in information about yourself. The app creates a custom weight loss plan just for you. On the app, you set goals for weight loss, exercise, nutrition, sleep and more, and receive plans to help you achieve these goals. The app contains many tools for tracking what you eat, including a barcode scanner, recipe builder, and calorie counter. Lose It! also sinks with many other apps and devices, such as MapMyFitness (see below), Nike+ Fuelband, Fitbit Tracker, Jawbone, and Up. Another exciting dimension to the app is its community of users. Lose It! offers team- and group-based challenges where you compete with or work together toward common goals.
Map My Run
This fitness-tracking app has several unique components that help set it apart from other apps. It uses your phone’s built-in GPS to track all of your fitness activity. Therefore, all of your activity is recorded including duration, distance, pace, speed, calories burned, and route traveled. In addition, the application contains over 70 million routes to choose from on their interactive map. There is even space for you keep track of what you eat alongside of your workouts for an overall snapshot of your health. And if you ever need an extra burst of motivation, there is a social network aspect that allows you to interact with other users by cheering them on or ever starting some friendly competition to keep you going!
My Fitness Pal
This app is a great overall wellness app, infusing both health and fitness into one. With an enormous database of food and drinks, it is easy to look up calories as you prepare your meals. You can also easily log your meals to keep track of your daily food intake. When you input your daily activity, My Fitness Pal calculates how many calories you burned. Also included is a huge collection of weight-loss plans to help you get started!
Cody
Cody is not only a place to log your workouts and track your progress. It is also a community where you can follow friends and make new ones, as well as give and receive support through a system of likes, comments, and hashtags. On this app, your workout log is a virtual journal that includes details like times and locations. Cody also contains videos from training coaches that you can utilize and even play from your television through Apple TV.