Don't wait for 2020 to get fit
Run one mile: check. Do 50 pushups: check. Plank for one minute: check. Backslide into your former state of inactivity after only one week of exercise in 2019: check.
If this sounds like you, don’t worry, it’s not too late to recommit to your fitness-focused New Year’s resolution (don’t feel bad, it’s the easiest resolution to break for most of us).
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Getting in shape doesn’t have to wait until 2020. With the right coaching, guidance, and encouragement, you could be a walking example of fitness goals gone right by New Year’s Eve 2019.
To achieve your goals, you could go all out and start paying for a gym membership and a personal trainer and a diet plan–or you can you keep your wallet fat while you slim down at home with any of the best fitness apps available on your smartphone.
There are hundreds of great fitness apps out there, making it hard to choose which is best, especially when most of those apps offer the same benefits at varying subscription prices.
That’s why we’re picking three of the most unique, free fitness apps that offer some of the best benefits here. If you’re ready to conquer fitness in 2019, download these fitness apps and get to work.
Nike Training Club: Your Exercise Library
Download from iTunes
Download from Google Play
Maybe you’re still going strong with your new diet or healthy eating habits but just can’t find the time to stay active? You definitely don’t have time for the gym, and sure, you could do some basic in-home workouts, but you feel limited in terms of what kind of exercises can actually be accomplished in your living room.
As one of the most popular fitness apps available, Nike Training Club is like having a personal library of exercises you can view and download at any time. With over 185 free workouts across all major types of exercise, including strength, endurance, mobility and yoga, you won’t ever be hard pressed to figure out a routine – Nike Fitness Club puts them together for you.
What’s key is most of these workouts are bodyweight-only workouts so you can get fit quick without spending hours in the gym with machines and weights.
Personalization
When it comes to selecting workouts, Nike Training Club tailors your experience when you sign up based on your gender and the amount of workouts you usually do or are capable of doing per week. The more you train with the fitness app, the smarter it gets about what routines to serve up.
Workout Routines
You can let the app recommend routines, or you can choose your own, browsing by muscle group or workout type. Within each category, the app serves up multiple exercise routines with information like how long the routine takes, what level of experience it requires, how intense it is, why that type of workout works well, what the health benefits are and whether it requires equipment.
You can also view workout collections where the fitness app strings together multiple related routines you can follow to achieve your specific fitness goals.
Jam, Shop, Track and Post
Nike Fitness Club comes with a few extras that make it more than just a library of exercises and more of a one-stop fitness app. Some notable extras include:
- The ability to sync specific music from your device, including from Apple Music and Spotfiy, to make sure you always have the right pump-up jams going for specific routines
- Access to the Nike Training Shop where you can make in-app purchases of your favorite Nike gear to ensure you’re comfortable when you work out
- An activity tracker to track all your workouts, other activities and milestones, giving you a view into your progress over time
- A social feed where you can find and add friends to view their activity, start healthy competitions on leaderboards and show off your stats to them
If you need help getting back into an active lifestyle, Nike Fitness Club is a fitness app you can trust will give you more than a few creative ideas and without the cost of a gym membership.
MyFitnessPal: Your Diet Counselor
Download from iTunes
Download from Google Play
While Nike Fitness Club shows you what’s possible with working out, MyFitnessPal is a fitness app designed around the other vital aspect of getting in shape: diet.
Even using the free version of the app, with MyFitnessPal you gain incredible insight into your daily consumption habits and can completely alter your diet to get back on track. The paid premium version of the fitness app takes that ability even further.
Set Goals
An important aspect of getting and staying in shape is to set goals. Without them, it’s easy to plateau and let yourself fall into the trap of maintaining rather than continuously improving.
One of the strongest features of the MyFitnessPal fitness app is the ability to set goals, from how much you want to lose on a weekly basis to what kind of nutrition plan you want to stick with to how many workouts per week and how many minutes per workout you’re committed to following through on.
As you reach or miss these goals, the MyFitnessPal fitness app provides an easy way to see where you are on your journey.
Keep a Nutrition Diary
Another strong feature of this fitness app is its library of nutritional data, with searchable information about all kinds of food people eat, and the ability to track what you’re eating in a diary.
Throughout the day, you track what you’re eating and can see nutritional levels like calories, protein and more to understand what you’re eating and how it’s affecting your body. Datapoints and visual charts help you better understand this. When you complete a diary entry for the day, MyFitnessPal will give you an analysis of how you can improve or continue eating well.
You can also create recipes and save them so you can easily recall ingredients to make the perfect meals and stay on track with a healthy diet. And if you lead a busy lifestyle, one where you often skip a meal or a snack, MyFitnessPal lets you set reminders for when to eat.
Connect Fitness Apps
While MyFitnessPal is focused on helping you keep a healthy diet, it makes it easy to connect countless other apps like MapMyFitness, the sister fitness app to MyFitnessPal that provides workout routines, to build a robust fitness plan.
If you already have a good sense of what workout routines you need to accomplish, or if you’re using another fitness app like Nike Training Club or MapMyFitness to get that information, MyFitnessPal could be a great way to ensure you’re managing the other half of fitness, eating well, with just as much due diligence.
Blog and Fitness Extras
Fitness is as much about knowledge as it is about doing the work. It’s important to understand the benefits of certain workouts and nutrition plans. That’s why a noteworthy extra of this fitness app is the access it provides to the MyFitnessPal blog for new tips on diet and fitness each day.
On top of this, you have other means through which you can increase your commitment to keeping fit, such as:
- Adding friends and sharing progress with them
- Tracking steps and setting step goals to meet each day
- Tracking your progress over time with visual charts
If you want to prioritize the nutritional route to a healthy body, MyFitnessPal is a great fitness app to use in conjunction with whatever other plans you have for exercise. The best part is you can get so much out of it for free.
Sweatcoin: Your Fitness Reward
Download from iTunes
Download from Google Play
With all the hard work of increasing your amount of exercise and decreasing the unhealthy eating habits you’ve enjoyed for so long, it’s safe to say your reward is a healthier, happier you with a smaller waist size.
Think again: what if you actually got rewarded with a digital currency you can spend? That’s where Sweatcoin comes in.
This highly unique fitness app tracks your outdoor steps (indoor steps aren’t trackable at this point in time) using your smartphone’s accelerometer and GPS location. It then converts your steps into a currency: sweatcoins.
Sweatcoins can be spent in the Sweatcoin marketplace on a range of goods (wireless earphones, an iPhone, etc.) as well as services and experiences (an expedition to the Jungles of Borneo) and even converted into actual cash (20,000 sweatcoins gets you $1,000 in PayPal).
Then again, given how much all of your new fitness apps have done for you, maybe you would prefer to donate your sweatcoins to a partnering charity–you can do that too. You can also exchange sweatcoins with friends and family.
Don’t Forget to Stretch
Fitness is one of those things that may seem antithetical to the digital world at first. It’s so bodily, so physical, it seems to clash with the abstract world of code and phone screens. But these three fitness apps and many others available for iOS and Android have taken exercise, diet and the benefits of following a healthier lifestyle to new levels.
Don’t be afraid to stretch your comfort zone from following a more traditional training regiment to following a modern, advanced path to a healthier you with the creativity, efficiency and insights you can get just through three unique fitness apps like Nike Training Club, MyFitnessPal and Sweatcoins. Enjoy!
