Revamp Your Fitness Routine with Top Health Apps for iPhone

Your iPhone can help you take charge of and improve your overall fitness. Paired with the right apps, you can run further, set new records, meet health goals, and track your gains.

Health Tracking: Apple Health

Tracking various metrics is an effective way to enhance fitness as it helps you identify where you need to focus on for improvement. Having a record of your progress can serve as a powerful motivator, especially when you can see the effects of your lifestyle changes. It can be difficult to recognize the progress you've made in a few months, but with tracking, you can get a clearer picture.

Apple Health, which comes with your iPhone, is an all-in-one wellness center that can help you track your weight, estimate cardiovascular fitness (VO2 max), record daily steps, walking and running distances, and much more. Health can even analyze your data and present it in trends to make it easier for you to track your overall fitness progress.

If your goal is to lose weight, seeing your progress on a graph over time can be highly motivating. Similarly, tracking your daily step count, total energy expended, number of workouts per week, as well as your resting heart rate and exercise recovery times (where data is available), can help you stay on track and achieve your fitness goals.

Health app is equipped to integrate with various data sources, including wearables such as Apple Watch and third-party apps that monitor your workouts and calorie intake. This app allows you to compile all the data in one place, creating a dashboard that provides an instant overview of your overall fitness progress.

Moreover, the data collected through the Health app is encrypted and synchronized across all your devices via iCloud. You can also utilize this app to create a Medical ID that displays on your iPhone lock screen or receive reminders about your medication schedule. Additionally, the option to share this data with a healthcare provider is also available.

Meal Tracking: Cronometer

Maintaining a healthy weight is not just about exercising, but also about what you eat. To achieve your weight goals, it's important to know what you're consuming and how many calories you need. This is where meal-tracking apps come in handy. Among the top-rated apps on the App Store, Cronometer stands out as a reliable tool that takes the guesswork out of your diet. Although Cronometer used to be a paid app, it now offers a free version as well as a subscription service called Cronometer Gold. For only $9.99 per month, Cronometer Gold provides an ad-free experience, a web-based recipe importer, a fasting timer, and more personalized insights and recommendations to help you achieve your dietary targets.

Cronometer allows users to easily track their food intake, including prepackaged items, custom foods, and recipes. The app also allows for the scanning of barcodes to add snacks and meals, as well as the logging of exercise and biometric data such as heart rate and blood pressure. By connecting to Apple Health, Cronometer can automatically incorporate Apple Watch data and populate health records. The app not only tracks overall energy intake and expenditure, but also helps identify any gaps in the user's diet, such as a need for more of a particular macronutrient like zinc or iron, or if the user is consuming too much caffeine or sodium.

Cronometer has an advantage over MyFitnessPal as the latter has faced criticism from its users for removing features from the free version. For instance, scanning foods using the barcode scanner would require a subscription, which is not the case with Cronometer. However, if you prefer MyFitnessPal or are willing to pay for the missing features, it's still worth giving it a try.

Get Running: Nike Run Club

Nike Run Club is a running tracker and coach that can be downloaded and used for free, regardless of whether you wear their brand. The app offers free use of all its features, without any premium subscriptions required. Although the app is free of traditional ads, it is worth noting that the entire platform serves as a promotion for Nike.

To use Nike Run Club, an account must be created. Once logged in, the app will request access to Apple Health in order to read and write activity data to your device, as well as your location to track your runs. Users can start a run immediately or select a tailored program to achieve specific goals.

RELATED: The Best Training Ropes.

Nike Run Club offers a variety of plans tailored to different skill levels, such as a four-week beginner introduction, a plan to work towards a 5K, and an 18-week marathon training program for those looking to push themselves further. For runners who prefer setting individual goals, the app allows you to customize distance, time and speed targets for each run. The app also provides over 250 guided runs, ranging from sprints to carefully-paced 5Ks and 10Ks, with real-time feedback on pacing. Nike Run Club even integrates with Apple Music and Spotify, allowing you to enjoy your favorite tunes while you run. To keep you motivated, the app features leaderboards and challenges that you can join, and you can add friends on the app for some healthy competition. Best of all, Nike Run Club is completely free, making it a great option for beginners who want to start running without breaking the bank.

Compete and Discover: Strava

For fitness enthusiasts who prefer tracking their route-based workouts while staying connected with other like-minded individuals, Strava stands out as an excellent option. The app offers a subscription-based payment model, but the free version still provides a comprehensive logging and sharing feature to help you get started. It gained popularity among runners and cyclists for its ability to track, log, share, and even compete with fellow fitness enthusiasts.

The app is a versatile tool for tracking a range of activities, from hiking and watersports to winter sports and even rock climbing, golf, and skateboarding. It also allows for tracking static activities such as strength training, yoga, and HIIT workouts.

One of the standout features of Strava is its community and the wealth of features that have developed around it over time. If you have friends who are into cycling or running, chances are they've used Strava before and may even be sharing their workouts on the platform. This social aspect can be a great motivator to get out and be active.

Strava also offers a safety feature called Beacon, which allows you to share your location with up to three contacts, making it a great option for solo outdoor activities. With a premium plan, users gain access to even more advanced features, such as offline routes, discovery tools to find new places to explore, and the competitive segment leaderboards that have made Strava a favorite among athletes.

Share and Access Workouts: Apple Fitness

With iOS 16, Apple has made it possible for all iPhone users to access the Fitness app, which was previously only available to Apple Watch owners. Additionally, users can now set a Move goal for themselves every day, which can be achieved through daily exercise. This progress can be tracked using third-party apps like Strava and Nike Run Club, or directly through an Apple Watch.

Apple Fitness not only serves as a personal tracking hub for your workouts, but it also enables you to share your daily progress with friends. By adding friends, you can compare your daily energy expenditure, exercise minutes, and stand minutes if they're using an Apple Watch. Moreover, you can challenge your contacts to a friendly competition.

For better training resources, you can subscribe to Fitness+, Apple's premium training program, which offers thousands of video and audio workouts ranging from beginner running to kickboxing, strength training, core workouts, pilates, dance, and more. You can use your Apple Watch to personalize your workouts based on your heart rate or watch them on Apple TV for an immersive experience.

If you're new to Apple Fitness+, you can enjoy a free month trial by opening the Fitness+ tab within the Fitness app on your iPhone. In addition, purchasing an iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, or Apple TV will grant you a three-month free trial. After the trial period, Apple Fitness+ costs $9.99 per month.

Looking for other training programs to try out? Peloton is a great option on the App Store. While it's optimized for use with Peloton's own Bike and Tread accessories, the $12.99 monthly subscription offers a variety of workout types, from yoga and strength training to boxing and pilates. Plus, you can join live workouts for an added sense of community and motivation.

Intermittent Fasting: Fastic

Intermittent fasting has been linked to potential health benefits for a variety of conditions. While the extent of these benefits may be debated, fasting can aid in weight loss by limiting snacking opportunities. However, adhering to a fasting schedule requires strong willpower, which is where apps like Fastic can assist. Fastic is a fasting timer app that guides users in selecting and maintaining a fasting plan, utilizing eating and fasting windows. The app offers reminders and progress updates, with the timer feature being particularly helpful for tracking the body's internal changes during a fast. Even after a year and significant weight loss, the app's "Start Fast" and "Stop Fast" buttons remain useful for maintaining a fasting routine.