Stefani has successfully used food-tracking apps on her own weight-loss journey to support meal planning and more. “Food tracking apps are a tool for consumers that can help them meet a variety of health, nutrition, and body composition goals,” explains California-based registered dietitian Yasi Ansari, M.S., R.D.N., C.S.S.D. As an alternative, the pricier Apple Watch Ultra 3 is also worth considering. That model offers more advanced fitness features, like dual-frequency GPS, a brighter screen, and greater water resistance, making it a better option for serious athletes.
Health Coach
Peloton’s app extends beyond the bike to include strength, yoga, running, and walking classes led by high-energy instructors. The leaderboard and achievement systems are highly motivating for people who thrive on group accountability. My beat includes home fitness equipment, outdoor athletic accessories, and a wide range of running gear. I’m particularly interested in gear designed for people trying new physical activities. If you want to step up your fitness tracking beyond the basics, the Whoop has plenty of other features to engage serious athletes.
AutoSleep: Watch Sleep Tracker
If you want a bit of added motivation, without hiring a trainer, it’s hard to think of a better option than joining a virtual race and competing against real users. The app will not reward progress until you have logged your previous sessions, which allows for both accountability and progressive overload. She also notes the app syncs with the Apple Watch but not apps like Garmin, Fitbit, or Strava, and she found it a bit frustrating to manually enter workout data later. Visually, it looks simple, but once you open up your training plan for any given day, it’s very immersive,” he told me. The Shred app is an AI-powered virtual trainer that can be used to customize workouts in your home or commercial gym.
Can I use a fitness tracker without a smartphone?
MadMuscles integrates with Apple Health, allowing users to track workout activity and combine training data with Apple Watch health metrics. Many apps allow users to start and track workouts directly from the Apple Watch, making training sessions more convenient. Fitness apps can integrate these metrics into workout programs and activity goals. Apple Watch provides real-time biometric data that can improve training outcomes. Apps that integrate with the watch can use these metrics to enhance workout tracking and performance insights. These apps integrate with Apple Watch to track workouts, heart rate, and activity metrics.
Also tested
Apple Fitness isn’t amazing at tracking strength training metrics like reps or sets, but if you have a lot of variety in your fitness routine, it can handle a little bit of everything. Its sleep tracking capabilities are enhanced with a sleep score and personalized coaching, giving insights into sleep quality and health metrics such as heart rate variability (HRV). Many fitness trackers in this category double as smartwatches, displaying notifications, calls, and messages when a phone is in range.
- I found the recovery time predictions useful for planning my daily movement after working out, including how many walks to take and when to go to bed.
- One of our favorite features is the advanced sleep coaching that analyzes your sleep habits, suggests what you can do to improve, and is even FDA-approved to detect sleep apnea.
- It functions as more of a retroactive fitness tracker, so if you’re wanting to gauge real-time performance mid-workout, I recommend more of a true fitness tracker, like the Garmin Venu 3.
- Plus, it captures more than just workouts—making it an affordable all-around tracker.
- You can also play your favorite music simultaneously with the app going.
- Compared with true fitness watches like Garmin’s, the Galaxy Watch 8 has a couple of limitations.
I wore each device 24/7 for multiple weeks at a time, often back-to-back or side-by-side, to compare the accuracy of metrics like heart rate, recovery, step count, and sleep quality in real-world use. The cellular model is also the first 5G-equipped Apple Watch, offering better signal strength and faster load times — a useful upgrade if you like to run or head to the gym phone-free. Compared to other fitness trackers, Whoop focuses less on heart rate zones and best free workout apps more on total-body strain, which I found to be an interesting shift in perspective. I was surprised to find that my strength sessions didn’t add much strain to my day, but an hour-and-a-half yoga class did.
Best fitness watch for runners
The base and middle-tier subscriptions provide plenty of specialized activity data, including coaching features that provide tips for exercise and sleep. Combined with manually entered data in Apple’s Health app (such as height, weight, gender, and age), these sensors help Apple estimate metrics like steps, distance, and calories burned. I found that the AirPods Pro 3 tracked these basic metrics fairly accurately. For example, counting a known 1-mile distance as 0.97 mile, and coming within the range I expected for estimated calories burned doing a test workout. Also new to the Charge 6, you can now broadcast heart rate via Bluetooth to some third-party apps like Peloton.
Strava (iOS, Android)
Over the last few years, Oura has packed its app with a comprehensive list of health metrics, with the AI Oura Advisor as the flashy topper to make everything more accessible. Aside from the obvious nightly stats about sleep quality or heart health, Oura tries to analyze long-term trends and provide more context on your body’s ability to handle stress. More recently, Strava has doubled down on Athlete Intelligence, a tool that utilizes your workout history to assess the quality of a specific workout and provide context for your improvement over time. Essentially, Strava offers personalized, tailored workouts, without committing to a long-term plan. Or, use a spreadsheet to lay out your long-term workout plans, then a specific running or strength app to put those plans into action. I used that method to plan my months-long marathon training (see above), paired with my Garmin watch, and it was highly effective.
Best Garmin watch
You can sync the watch to the Armitron Connect app, which is supposed to give you more detailed breakdowns of your metrics. In terms of tracking, the watch was not as accurate as our top pick for measuring distances and the heart rate readouts were usually higher than those on our trusted heart rate monitor. For the price ($75) it’s a fairly sleek watch, but leaves a lot to be desired in tracking capability. There are also specialized GPS running watches and smartwatches that provide the same health-related information and much more.
Runna: Running Plans & Coach
She loves spending time with her husband and kids and deep cleaning anything she can. Lindsay loves competing with friends and has done multiple half marathons, CrossFit competitions, and more. The Four-Layer Fitness App Test exists because choosing a fitness app is not just about features. It is about whether the app fits your phone, your watch, your budget, and your comfort level with data sharing. An app that scores well on all four layers will stay on your phone for months.
Best Fitness Trackers (without phone): Comparison
For runners, there’s a built-in flashlight for safety when pounding the pavements in low light, race time predictions and pace tracking to help you stay on target. After having a baby last year, I finally embraced the convenience of workout apps myself. So whether you’re total beginner, wanting to gain muscle, or simply looking to incorporate some low-key exercises into your day, here are the best workout apps worth a download. All of them work whether you have an iPhone or Android and all offer a free trial period so you can test before you buy. The Fitbit Charge 6 Fitness Tracker is an advanced, multi-faceted health and fitness device designed to cater to a wide range of wellness needs.
Every option on this list was a sample I requested from brands for testing purposes. Forbes Vetted ratings are based on thorough evaluations by our editorial team to help you choose the best products with confidence. Several apps on the Apple store or Google Play claim they’re free with in-app purchases; however, when you download the app, you realize the in-app purchase is to unlock use of the app at all. There are plenty of online yoga instructors to try if neither personality quite gels with you. If Adriene cooing that a pose is “yummy” makes you cringe, you can also give Jessamyn Stanley or Yoga with Tim a shot. For more tips, check out our story on Everything You Need for Your Yoga Practice.
The solar-powered watch can extend the battery life even further, but the screen is not quite as bright as the AMOLED option. The solar watch also does not have a touchscreen like the AMOLED one, making it a bit less convenient to have to click through the features via buttons. The Ultra 3 offers all the typical metrics of the older Apple Watch models—activity rings, over 60 workout modes, blood oxygen, ECG, etc. But the Ultra 3 can be used as a dive computer, an emergency siren, and a compass that retraces your steps (ideal for those prone to getting lost mid-hike). You’ll get more use out of a fitness tracker that’s user-friendly, comfortable to wear and nice to look at.