Top 7 Health & Fitness Apps you need on your iPhone & Apple Watch
The App Store has a ton of apps dedicated to understanding your health and fitness better. But which ones to install? After almost 2+ years of showing fitness enthu and exploring the App Store, this is my list of the Top 7 Health and Fitness apps that I feel you need to try out too!
Without a doubt, the Health app on your iPhone shows you a lot of interesting and important metrics related to your health. If you have an Apple Watch, then the Fitness app is another important app to keep track of your fitness, milestones and share them with others.
However, they are not enough.
If you are serious about health and fitness, you need more than Apple’s Health and Fitness app (pun intended). After over two and half years of using my Apple Watch and getting serious about fitness, I realized that the App Store has a lot of great apps that understand your fitness metrics and offer better predictions of your energy levels for future workouts.
All these apps are free to install from the App Store but have in-app purchases within. Many of them even have an iPad app or an Apple Watch app. I will make sure to list out those specifications. Here’s a list of the apps, in case you are in a hurry and just need the names (make sure to save this article for the future though):
1. Fitpage
2. Lose It!
3. Seven
4. Strava
5. Athlytic
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1. Fitpage
iPhone & iPad App Available. In-App Purchases (Outside of the App Store)
Fitpage is like Instagram for fitness freaks. It allows you to see your workout metrics in a much better formatted UI than the one on the Fitness app. Apart from this it also has a ‘Learn’ tab with an infinite scroll of health-related advice from experts (just like reels on Insta).
You can also follow and connect with other runners and cyclers in your area with the ‘Engage’ tab of the app. Fitpage also has a bunch of smart coach plans that are paid (out of the App Store) for Weight Loss, 10K, Half Marathons, etc.
I love this app personally because it keeps me in the loop with some new fitness and health advice that I need instead of asking me to subscribe to podcasts and shows that are often too comprehensive. Also, the smart coach plans are a great way of getting started with your fitness routine.
2. Lose It!
iPhone, iPad & Apple Watch App Available. In-App Purchases.
Lose It is a calorie-counting app. And a very good one at that.
The deal with calorie-counting apps is simple:
- the food database has to be huge to make sure that even if you are traveling to a foreign country or state you can count on the app to have some idea about the cuisine of the place.
- If at all, the dish you are looking for is not in the database, you should be able to add it to the database of the app easily, if you have sufficient information.
Lose It does that well and offers a great user interface and experience too. The way I judge that is by checking if an app developer can make an iPad app too and in this case, Lose It is not just a good job but a great one because they have an iPad app as well as an Apple Watch App.
If you log your workouts with your iPhone or Apple Watch, the app also gives you a calorie bonus along with your daily calorie budget.
Apart from this, Lose It allows you to track your weight and based on your daily calorie consumption predicts when you are to reach your weight loss/gain milestone.
With the premium subscription through an in-app purchase, you can also log your water intake and understand your sleep, heart rate, and some other metrics following the food you logged. For me, this app has been my daily calorie budget calculator for the past 1000+ days and I don’t plan on looking back now.
3. Seven
iPhone, iPad & Apple Watch App Available. In-App Purchases.
Seven has been my go-to home workout app for two years now. I use it on my iPad rather than on my iPhone for the sake of better visibility. The app works on a simple idea: Don’t have enough time to workout in the gym? Can’t understand how much to work out? Seven Minutes is enough.
This idea was game-changing for me back during the COVID lockdown era when the only option was home-workouts and this app was my starting point. I started with a seven-minute workout — a single circuit of 10x exercises thirty-second reps and ten seconds of cool-down between each.
With time, I slowly increased this to 15 minutes, then 30 minutes, and finally 45 minutes. You can even create a custom workout of the exercises you want and even modify the number of repetitions and circuits to your liking.
With the premium subscription through an in-app purchase, you can unlock different types of workouts and exercises. However, the free app offers enough incentive to get you started on your fitness routine and should be enough for newbies of home-workout.
4. Strava
iPhone & Apple Watch App Available. In-App Purchases.
Strava is an excellent app for slightly amateur fitness geeks. It gives you slightly better details about your workout and allows you to easily share them with others in the community.
Strava is best for outdoor workouts like running, cycling, hiking, etc. It connects best with your fitness tracker and smartwatches like the Apple Watch and does a great job of understanding your fitness metrics during the workout.
For a runner like me, it helps me keep track of not just my running workouts but also my training shoes and understand each shoe’s mileage during and after its lifetime. It helps me understand my average pace, heart rate, ground elevation, and other such metrics during my run. You can also join running clubs and challenges, right here on Strava.
With a premium subscription to Strava, you should be able to understand your fitness trends over a month or so. For serious fitness enthusiasts, these metrics help you train better and schedule your future workouts accordingly.
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5. Athyltic
iPhone, iPad & Apple Watch App Available. In-App Purchases.
Athlytic is no simple app. It’s your AI Fitness coach right on your iPhone. It goes beyond what Starva offers you as mere metrics.
It analyzes the data using AI algorithms and helps you understand your recovery level based on heart rate variability, resting heart rate, respiratory rate, blood oxygen level, and wrist temperature apart from the sleep metrics, net energy (of food consumed), and exertion level (from last workouts).
With the premium subscription of this app, you should be able to unlock all the trends from your health metrics whose visibility was locked behind the paywall before.
The app does a good job of analyzing the data and giving predictions of your energy level based on them. These are raw numbers and need some context-reading before you can understand them completely.
6. Recover Athletics
Only iPhone App. In-App Purchases.
This is an app I discovered only recently during my Half-Marathon training. It is made by the same developer as Strava so I had absolutely no qualms while installing it when I heard about it.
As much as workouts are important for your fitness, so are recovery sessions. Recovery involves not exercises but rather simple movements for different muscles in your body for their relaxation and healthy functioning. Best of all, Strava and Recover Athletics are well-integrated. So after every workout is logged in Strava it would recommend a recovery program on the Recover app.
Again, there is a subscription for this app that allows you to unlock all the possible recovery programs available within the app. However, the free app does enough for newbie fitness geeks and I would highly recommend this app since recovery is just as important as fitness streaks.
7. Gentler Streak
iPhone, iPad & Apple Watch App Available. In-App Purchases.
Gentler Streak is peak fitness metrics and analysis.
It not only offers you a comprehensive view of your health and fitness metrics but also does a good job of predicting your energy level for forthcoming workouts — all of these with an exceptionally good user interface. It works on the flaw of the Athlytic app that just throws raw numbers at you while Gentler Streak hides all those numbers behind a good UI that only needs a single glance to understand the big picture.
Gentler Streak’s UI is so good that it makes sharing your workout metrics and monthly trends so much more fun. Here is an example of what I mean:
There are a bunch of articles about health and fitness on the app you can read, to understand fitness concepts better. Many of these are locked behind a paywall and getting a premium subscription not only unlocks these informative articles but also a bunch of other fitness metrics/monthly trends of the past workouts/months.
These are all the apps you can install directly from the App Store to take a few steps towards a more healthy lifestyle. While I did stress that the native Apple apps like Health and Fitness aren’t enough, they do a good job of giving you the metrics you need and not overanalyzing them to increase anxiety.
While we are on the topic of anxiety, physical health is not the only thing you need to take care of — Mental health means just as much if not more. That’s when journaling apps come to the rescue. If you don’t want to think much about which journaling app to use, Apple has your back with its native Journal app. I have written about it a few months ago on my page:
If the simplicity of the Journal app doesn’t suit your lifestyle, there are two other great apps for journaling. Another story I wrote covers these other two apps while I contrast them with the Journal app.
SPOILER: Day One wins the race!
Conclusion
It has been close to three years since I started taking fitness seriously. It only became more serious when I got my first Apple Watch in 2021. All these apps I wrote about above have been my experience with dandling on the App Store for the lack of better experience on the native apps. From Fitpage to Gentler Streak, all have helped me become more of a fitness enthusiast than before — helping me understand health metrics and analyze the trends in them.
However, gun to my head, if I was made to choose one single app to understand my health and fitness better — I would keep Gentler Streak. It has the best of both worlds — UI/UX as well as Comprehensive data and analysis. While I am shy to endorse this app completely because of how expensive the subscription might be for newbie fitness geeks if you had some cash to burn, this app would be a great choice.
However, your animated UI might not be to everyone’s liking which is why Athlytic and Strava-like apps exist. Raw numbers for serious trend analyzers. Also, I feel that in my interest in keeping this article short with just seven apps, I may have missed some cool health-fitness-related apps on the App Store. Do you know of any? Please do drop them in the comments below and let me know how they changed your outlook towards health/fitness. Maybe next time, I could mention them in a sequel to this article.
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