The 19 Best Apps and Tools for Staying Healthy on a Busy Schedule
Whether we’re tired, busy or just downright lazy, we all have our own excuses for not making healthy choices. But our world is full of apps and tracking tools that are specifically designed to incorporate healthfulness into your daily life.
From maintaining a healthy weight and increasing your endurance to getting more sleep and boosting your water intake, these 19 apps will make it easier to achieve all of your healthy lifestyle goals.
EatHealthy Track
The premise behind the EatHealthy app is genius in its simplicity. At night, the app asks you to assess your eating habits for that day with just three options: “Healthy day,” “Unhealthy day” or “Very unhealthy day.”
Over time, you’ll see patterns emerge and unlock achievements as you go for consecutive healthy days and healthy weeks.
Sleep Cycle
You know that terrible feeling when your alarm clock wakes you up mid-dream? This app is designed to avoid exactly that. On the Myles Apparel blog, Lincoln Eather describes Sleep Cycle as an “intelligent alarm clock” that intends to wake its users only during their lightest phase of sleep.
Sleep Cycle monitors your movement to detect when you’re most restless during a 30-minute time frame you’ve set, helping you wake up feeling more restful.
Fitness Blender
Fitness Blender was started by a husband and wife team in 2009, and has since grown to be one of the most popular free fitness resources on the web. According to Tammy Kresge at Organize Yourself Skinny, Fitness Blender caters both to seasoned exercisers and beginners. Its videos will help guide you along with a timer, calorie burn range counter and options for modifications accompanying each move.
Strava
Strava combines activity tracking with social media to take digital fitness to new heights. The app is filled with all the inspiring routes, tips and content that fitness lovers desire — nothing more, nothing less.
Strava’s new beacon adds an extra level of safety to his already great app. Technology writer Thorin Klosowski explains that beacon mode allows users to share their live GPS locations, so if a runner or cyclist doesn’t show up when they’re supposed to, they’ll be easier to find.
MyFitnessPal
MyFitnessPal was one of the first fitness tracking apps on the market, and it still remains one of the best. The app includes a calorie counter and detailed fitness journal — which its creators claim as being essential to losing weight and keeping it off.
For those wondering how MyFitnessPal stacks up to similar apps, fitness blogger Dani-Holmes Kirk argues that the app’s extensive database of foods and drinks for calorie tracking plus its ability to adjust calories based on tracked and manually-entered workouts set it apart.
Happify
If you’ve never considered using an app to support your mental and emotional health, now might be the time to start. Happify engages its users in daily exercises that deal with mindfulness, positivity and gratitude. These small tasks, or interventions, draw upon scientific research to make people feel more grounded, present and happy about their daily circumstances.
“We are essentially delivering interventions that are evidence-based and peer-reviewed,” Happify co-founder Ofer Leidner tells The Atlantic’s Julie Beck. “Our role is to liaise between the ivory tower — the scientific academic institutions that work on developing these interventions — and consumers.”
Down Dog
Sick of watching the same old yoga video? This app is sure to freshen up your routine because it provides a unique yoga flow sequence each time you use it. More like an actual yoga class and less like a workout video, Down Dog provides customizable features that adapt based on your preferences. For example, users can choose the pace of the workout, the level of difficulty and the duration.
As explained in Tom’s Guide, Down Dog will use these parameters to create a new sequence catered just to you. Each class also comes with a musical accompaniment and clear instructions for each pose, so you can be sure you get the most out of your workout.
Aura
Aura is a mindfulness app that’s built with artificial intelligence. The main premise is simple enough: It nudges you to do a three-minute mindfulness exercise so you can work out your brain a little every day.
But the AI is what makes the app shine. Over time, Aura tracks your habits and uses an algorithm to select the best exercise for you every day. “Mindfulness has transformed our lives, and we wanted to help everyone relieve stress & anxiety effortlessly through creating an AI-powered mindfulness app,” co-founder Steve Lee says.
Harvest
Not too long ago, most people knew almost intuitively what fruits and vegetables were in season locally. Most of us have to look that up these days. Fortunately, Harvest offers one of the most comprehensive databases for seasonal feeds. It will tell you what’s in season, show you how to identify good produce at the grocery store or market, and alert you to local pesticide levels so you can make more informed dietary choices.
Qinetic
The days of fad diets and workout crazes have long since passed, and people today long for more sustainable, impactful solutions. Qinetic accomplishes exactly that by working with leading coaches and trainers to provide results-driven workouts. Qinetic’s on-demand feature lets people enjoy high quality workouts at any time of the day, according to their schedules.
“People love it because they love the emotion that these coaches are bringing into it; you get the same motivating and energizing experience you would from actually being in the room with the instructor,” says Qinetic CFO, COO & co-founder Eric Brody.
Strides Habit Tracker
Strides Habit Tracker is another app designed to help people stay on track with their short- and long-term goals. Strides differs from other fitness tracking apps because it takes a holistic view of all important healthy habits. From drinking more water, to taking more steps, to reading more books, Strides can help you meet any and all of your healthy lifestyle goals.
The app is also intuitively designed and easy to use, and as tech writer and app reviewer Francesco D’Alessio concludes, the checklist style of the app is an important feature for coordinating your daily targets and weekly progress.
Spotify Running
As a study published in the Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness concludes, “exercise is more efficient when performed synchronously with music than when musical tempo is slightly slower than the rate of cyclical movement.”
Spotify Running draws on this research with expertly timed original scores that match your tempo when you begin running. The catch? Once the tempo is set, it doesn’t slow down. This is meant to push your limits and keep you inspired throughout your run, helping you achieve better results.
As tech writer Alison Griswold explains, “Spotify Running’s metronomic adherence to the beat is the musical equivalent of your coach commanding you to stay disciplined in a race.”
One important thing to point out with Spotify Running: The parent app, Spotify, will use a lot of data on a long run, so this might not be the best choice for outdoor runners. If you run at a gym or on a treadmill at home, though, and can connect to WiFi, you should be fine.
Nike+ Training Club
As one of the leading makers of fitness apparel in the world, it only makes sense that Nike would create a standout fitness app. Nike+ Training Club leverages Nike Trainers and professional athletes, helping you master every workout and move to the best of your ability.
Social media fitness icon Carissa Walford adds that the variety of options on the Nike+ Training Club app keep things interesting, which keeps her motivated to try different workouts. This also makes it easier to get through longer workouts, she says, like the 45-minute Total Body Sculpting workout.
FitStar Yoga
A branch of the popular app FitStar, FitStar Yoga provides classes taught by industry veteran Tara Stiles. Unlike DVDs and YouTube videos, FitStar Yoga offers 300 poses that can be customized based on the intensity, skill level and duration you desire. You can also connect monitoring devices like a Fitbit and MyFitnessPal for a more detailed overview of your habits.
If you are using FitStar Yoga and you want to maximize the benefits of an at-home practice, Stiles recommends clearing a space in your home that helps you feel great from the inside out. At her yoga company, Strala Yoga, Stiles opts for Christmas lights to keep people happy and relaxed.
Bit Timer
Bit Timer is built specifically for high-intensity interval training (HIIT) workouts, so it doesn’t track anything beyond 4 minutes. The app is sleek and minimal with just the right number of features for timing your workouts — all without the extra clutter.
Dietician and health blogger Elle Penner says it’s her favorite app for how sleek and intuitive it is. “The main screen has three sliders –– one for work time, rest time, and number of repetitions. All it takes is a simple slide of your finger to set the number of seconds and reps.”
Sworkit
Whether you want a quick, full-body workout or a lengthy muscle-intensive session, Sworkit will customize the perfect workout for you. The app, which originally appeared on the show Shark Tank, recently took its app to the next level with a set of six-week programs.
“These fitness plans take out a lot of the guesswork for our users, while giving them the flexibility to customize a plan that fits into their lifestyle,” says Sworkit CEO Benjamin Young. The new programs were crafted by professional fitness trainers and can be pursued at three different levels: beginner, intermediate and advanced.
Wahoo 7 Minute Workout
This quick and easy workout is perfect if you’re trying to squeeze a high-intensity sweat session into your busy day. The 7 Minute Workout app isn’t anything sophisticated — it follows a sequence of basic moves like crunches and jumping jacks — but it won’t fail to boost your heart rate.
And as the blog Fatherly suggests, quick, intensive interval workouts like this can actually be just as effective as running or biking for long periods of time.
Fitocracy
Fitocracy is a collaborative fitness site that incorporates gamification to make working out more accessible to everyone. Users can earn points for working out, and this helps motivate people and get them more excited about reaching their goals.
Since other users can see those scores and offer words of encouragement, the app also cultivates a sense of community. Co-founder Brian Wang adds: “You’ll also see this attitude around the app and website that’s kind of playful and lighthearted and doesn’t take itself too seriously, and that makes fitness less intimidating.”
Garmin Vivosmart HR+
Outshining the Fitbit in both performance and features, the Vivosmart HR+ by Garmin measures steps, distance, calories, heart rate and more all from your wrist. The app also syncs with Garmin’s online community of users, so you can share your workouts, plan your routes and set future goals while keeping tabs on everyone else.
James Stables, co-founder of Wareable, a website dedicated to wearable technology, says the benefits of Garmin’s Vivosmart HR+ include a screen that’s water resistant up to 50 meters, and a solid mix of heart rate and GPS tracking abilities.
And according to Caleb Denisen, editor at Digital Trends, the Vivoactive HR also has an abnormally long battery life, lasting up to eight days when in activity mode.
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