My Favourite 5 Health & Fitness Apps
A great set of five apps (plus an honourable mention) that are a must-have for anyone interested in their health and fitness
It’s safe to say that there’s no shortage of apps in the health and fitness space, but I’ve only found a few that I’d genuinely recommend to others. I use all of these apps myself on a regular basis and swear by them, so here’s my sales pitch on some of the best H&F apps I think are out there right now.
Strong
Strong is a workout tracker, and it does just that. You can make up to three workout templates in the free version, which is perfect if you follow a Push Pull Legs split. It shows you how to do most exercises with good form, with videos and written instructions, which is great for reference at the gym. It doesn’t have every exercise ever - some lesser known exercises like the Serratus Jab didn’t come up for me - but you can make them yourself and add in the instructions.
You can subscribe, which gives you infinite templates, analytics, body part measurement, plate calculator, but it works just fine for free. It’s £29.49 for a yearly subscription, a fiver for a monthly subscription, and £90 as a single-time payment.
I personally just use the free version and that honestly does the trick. The only problem I’d say with the app is that re-ordering exercises in a routine doesn’t work a lot of the time, and I’m not sure why, which can be mildly frustrating, but that’s a minor problem compared to the benefits it gives.
Foodnoms
Foodnoms is a great calorie tracker and infinitely better than MyFitnessPal. It doesn’t have any ads, the user interface is sleek and simple, and for the majority of needs it’s totally free. As far as calorie and macro trackers go, it ticks all the boxes for me. It integrates incredibly well with the Apple ecosystem, but is unfortunately not available for Android users.
The paid subscription clocks in at £30 a year, and the monthly subscription is £5. The paid version gives you water, caffeine and booze tracking, charts, intermittent fasting and portion size estimation - but unless any of these are a deal breaker, the app does it all perfectly fine in the free version.
My only complaint would be that, because it’s designed primarily for US users, those in the UK or anywhere else will struggle using the barcode scanner to import nutrition info from foods. I often found myself manually putting in the nutrition info, which takes about a minute for a meal, so it isn’t much of a fuss. And if you meal prep everything anyway, then you can just save the recipes and log them with no problems. The only thing I would say is to double check some of the community-submitted foods. I logged some oats from my overnight oats recipe the other day, and the micronutrients were all over the place.
Foodnoms is MyFitnessPal for people who hate MyFitnessPal. Give it a try - it’s just better.
Sleep Cycle
I used to use the iPhone alarm as my daily alarm, and occasionally used a watch to track my sleep, which gave me the scare of my life when I woke up and unreliable data from a cheap smartwatch. Sleep Cycle solved both of these problems.
The app’s alarms gives you either an instant wake up like your standard alarm, or more of a staggered option in which it calls “wake up easy”. You can also not use an alarm, and have the app simply analyse your sleep. I’ve used the wake up easy feature a couple of times and found it a bit annoying, but it might work for you. I stick to the standard alarm, which is much better than any others I’ve tried, because they’ve been, well, designed for humans. They’re not going to trigger the fight or flight reaction like the iPhone alarm does. I use the default sound and it works great.
It also analyses your sleep. You plug your phone in when you go to sleep, hit go, and it does it all just from the microphone. I have no idea how, but I’ve found the data to be much more reliable than when I’ve used smartwatches (Albeit off brand smartwatches). It’s simple, so reduces the friction of sleep tracking, and tracks metrics like sleep quality, regularity, and efficiency. The info is presented in such an understandable way that it makes interpreting it and understanding the concept of sleep cycles much easier.
The app will also give you an email course on improving sleep, and I actually used some of this information for reference when writing one of my first posts about sleep.
The premium version I would argue might be worth it. It gives you a bunch of analytics and graphs, and lets you listen to your sleep talking and other noises like coughing or snoring, and also syncs up with Apple Health. The subscription clocks in at £26.49 a year, and I would say if you’re serious about improving your sleep, I’d go for it. I don’t pay for it personally, but I’m quite lucky to have never needed serious help with my sleep, so I wouldn’t really be the target demographic.
All in all, Sleep Cycle is a great app to track your sleep without having to buy equipment, and gives you an alarm that you won’t hate.
Wim Hof Method
Shifting focus away from the gym and more towards breathwork and the cold, the WHM app is a great way to improve your lung capacity, mental endurance, immune system and more.
The app gives you a few exercises you can complete. I’ve personally stuck to the breathing basics and cold shower.
As a bit of background, the Wim Hof Method was developed by Dutch athlete Wim Hof, who cultivated a method of what is essentially controlled hyperventilation to endure extreme cold. Hof has completed a range of extreme sporting events, like climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in just shorts, and he puts it all down to his breathing technique and cold water conditioning.
The breathing basics exercise is what I was referring to earlier with the hyperventilation - you breathe in and out at a fast tempo for 30 to 40 breaths, then hold for as long as possible, before breathing again and repeating this for more cycles. From personal experience, I can say that this is quite challenging, and breathing nasally when doing this can be painful when you go hard, but the breath hold is euphoric - if you’ve ever had to have gas and air for an injury, it’s a similar sensation. I’ve got more mental clarity from this than in meditation (more on that later).
And of course we have the cold showers. You can start off with the 20-day cold shower challenge, and I would definitely recommend setting it to beginner if you’ve never done it before! The challenge involves you taking five showers a week, and progressively overloading the time from 15s on week one, to 1m by week four. I can’t stress enough the importance of starting with 15 seconds. The first time I went in a cold shower, I did three things: screamed, hyperventilated, and got out. I was in there for ten seconds tops. But, you build up resilience to the cold, and now I could comfortably go for minutes.
You can upgrade to a paid version of the app, with a yearly subscription costing £35 and a monthly subscription costing £6. I don’t subscribe to it and I don’t think it’s necessary to, but if this is something you really click with then it’s worth the price for extra practices.
Regardless of your fitness goals, I think you should give the WHM a try. It’s great for your mental health, pushes you outside your comfort zone, and can help you in the gym, having been proven to improve oxygen delivery during exercise.
Headspace
Meditation is something I believe we should all practice. It has a wealth of benefits, including stress reduction, increasing attention span, fight addiction, improve sleep, aids pain control, just to name a few. In my experience, meditation has improved literally every part of my life - in the words of entrepreneur Tim Ferriss, meditation is a “meta-skill”.
I’ve seen all of the benefits surface myself, having been meditating almost every day for about a year now. For example, I’ve noticed this week how drastically my pain tolerance increased - I dislocated my knee a couple of days ago, and the pain was relatively ok. I’ve done this three times before on my other leg, and it hurt so much more before having taken up meditation and other habits that may have boosted my pain tolerance. I wouldn’t put this all down to meditation, but it’s certainly a contributing factor.
It’s helped me through tough times like injury and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone, regardless of your fitness goals.
I’ve personally used the Headspace app the entire time. They have a ton of courses to learn the basics and advance your practice, with variable timers to progressively overload it too.
Not only does it give you meditation, but it has a range of different content, ranging from music, sleep-casts, guided yoga, mindful exercise, and many more.
The only complaint I have about the app is the download function. Every time I’ve tried to download meditations or packs, it hasn’t worked. Just bear that in mind if you don’t have internet access all the time.
Headspace is pretty pricey too, at £50 a year and £10 a month. But it’s worth the premium for the content. At the same price as your average streaming service subscription, I’d encourage you to drop that and buy this instead!
If you’re a student post-18, you’ll get a massive discount at £8 a year, and if you’re a teen in the US (13-18 years) you get it totally for free.
Honourable Mention: Stoic
An interesting little app, I’ve been using the Stoic app for a couple of weeks, filling out the daily guided journals. I’ve found it to be a fun little way to get in some more journaling and reading some interesting quotes from philosophies like Stoicism and Taoism.
The app is well-designed with a sleek user interface, and has options to journal, meditate, practice breathwork and view quotes and affirmations.
One of my favourite things about this app is the widgets. It has one which constantly shows you a box breathing cycle (4s in, 4s hold, 4s out, 4s hold) on your home screen, which is a great reminder to stay present.
I’ve also found the memento mori widget - which takes your date of birth and somehow calculates the date of your death, and gives you a countdown - and it scared the shit out of me. But, it’s a good way to boost my productivity by reminding me of the fleeting nature of life, as grim as it is.
You can subscribe to the app for £36.99 a year, which gives you a lot of mindfulness exercises and is probably worth it if you find the app useful.
Conclusion
With a near endless amount of health and fitness apps, I hope this list has given you some clarity of which ones to go for.
If you’ve never used any apps, I’d recommend giving all of these a go. They’ve really helped me in my journey to becoming stronger and healthier, mentally and physically.
I’d be interested to hear which ones you use and whether you use any at all? Let me know on my Instagram, @weightsnthought.
Best,
Tom
Sources:
(For both images and info)
https://www.strong.app/
https://foodnoms.com/
https://www.sleepcycle.com/how-sleep-cycle-works/
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/wim-hof-method/id890471578?platform=iphone
https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1312926037?platform=iphone
https://www.headspace.com/
https://www.healthline.com/health/wim-hof-method
DISCLAIMER
The content provided in these posts are designed to be educational and informative. I am not a medical doctor, psychologist, therapist, nutritionist, or registered dietitian. The contents of these emails should not be seen as medical, psychological, dietary, nutritional, or healthcare advice of any kind. Always consult a qualified health professional on any matters regarding your health.