These days, we all spend most of our time at home, for obvious reasons. Finding a way to safely get in shape is easy with these beginner-friendly fitness apps, no matter what age or weight you are. No need to go outside, either! They’ve been categorized into three categories for convenience with two free apps per category: Weight Loss, Calorie Counting, and Home Workouts.
Weight Loss
When searching for “weight loss apps,” Noom and Weight Watchers are two of the most popular ones in the App Store. In a comparison between Noom and Weight Watchers, both offer great resources for online nutrition and health coaching. These two apps are also heavily backed by research – it’s just up to you to decide which is more favorable based on your preferences.
Weight loss is easier when you have apps that act as a pocket dietitian and coach.
Noom
Noom is a pretty new app that acts like a pocket-sized dietitian and health coach. It’s beneficial for those new to weight loss. It offers a structured course to help build healthy habits while providing an excellent user interface. Like most fitness apps, Noom lets you enter your goals and current weight and then sets a recommended caloric intake per day.
What makes Noom stand out from other weight loss apps is that Noom assigns a registered personal dietitian to help guide you on your weight loss journey. Aside from helping you set realistic goals, having an actual person on the other side of the app allows users to have accountability, which helps stay motivated when losing weight.
Weight Watchers
Weight Watchers originally began in the early 1960s, when a group of people got tired of fad diets. They discussed the best ways to lose weight, as backed up by science. From there, the founder realized that what she needed, along with a weight-loss program, is peer support. More than half a century later, Weight Watchers now has an app that teaches sustainable eating habits.
The app works by first evaluating your goals and providing a personalized target “point range.” The app users can use this “point range” to determine how healthy a meal is by calculating each ingredient’s point values. If logging your meals per component is too tedious, you can use one of the app’s 4000 recipes where the entire meal’s points are already logged.
Calorie Counting
In fitness and nutrition, the basic concept of losing weight is Calories In, Calories Out (also known as CICO). No matter how much you exercise, if you’re still eating more than what you lose, you won’t lose weight. Here are the two top apps to track calories: MyFitnessPal and Lose It!
You CAN eat anything and lose weight, as long as you learn how to count your calories.
MyFitnessPal
MyFitnessPal has been around since 2005 – fifteen years as of today – and it shows in the app in both positive and negative ways. On the positive side, MyFitnessPal is the standard calorie tracker app and paved the way for the other apps. It probably has the largest food database, which you can either search by typing the name of the food or scan using a barcode scanner. Here, users can also log their starting and goal weights. The app automatically computes how many calories you should eat based on your goals and height and weight.
Lose It!
Compared to MyFitnessPal, Lose It! is newer and more straightforward but still useful as a calorie counting app. The advantages Lose It! has over MyFitnessPal is that it has a more modern user interface and more ways of adding food to your tracker. You can scan barcodes with Lose It!, but you can also enter the food you eat quickly using photo recognition by taking a picture of your meal.
Workouts
At-home workout apps are abundant on both the App Store (for Apple users) and the Play Store (for Android users). This, along with a lot of fitness wearables makes it easy to work out anywhere. Still, Nike and Adidas are two big activewear brands with highly rated training apps with more than 10 million installs worldwide.
No gym needed – these exercise apps will help you get fit one home workout at a time.
Nike+ Training
The Nike+ Training app has almost 200 free workouts prepared by professional Nike trainers to choose from, with high-quality videos loaded with information on what to do and how to do it. This app lets you select a specific fitness goal to tailor your current workout needs, whether it’s to get lean, get toned, or get stronger. The videos are easy-to-follow, so you can get fit while targeting the right muscles and avoiding injuries.
Adidas Training
Similarly, the Adidas Training app offers various video workouts to suit your needs, depending on your fitness level, available equipment, and other preferences. Aside from the ready-made activities, you can create a custom workout by selecting the desired body parts to focus on and the workout duration. Adidas Training app has videos and audio narration on what to do and how to do it.