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I use apps for everything from obtaining free stuff to earning extra income. I also use them for some extra help on the health and fitness journey I’ve been undertaking for the last year and a half. I was always active—I teach spin classes, consistently ride my Peloton, and have always frequented the gym—but something really took hold of me at the end of 2023 and made me want to get, like, super active. Naturally, I downloaded all the apps I thought could help me as I set out to keep track of my protein intake, devise the perfect schedule of workout splits, and monitor all my biodata. Here are the ones I liked best.
For cardio: the Peloton app
You don’t need a Peloton Bike, Tread, or Row to enjoy the benefits of the Peloton app, which I’ve written about before. For about $24 per month, you can access cycling, rowing, and running classes that work just fine on non-Peloton equipment, plus walking, yoga, stretching, and even meditation classes. I follow along with these all the time, like when I’m walking outside, running on a treadmill at the gym, or just sitting in my living room, since the app works not only on my iPhone, but on my Roku, too.
I like this app a lot better than having to always come up with my own cardio routine or following the advice of a random fitness influencer—the variety is massive and the instructors are so professional. With the big-name brand comes expertise and some assurance that you’re actually getting useful, efficient, and safe instruction. The instructors’ cues are always clear and direct, new classes get uploaded every day, and I feel like I get a lot more out of this than I would if I just hopped on a rowing machine and worked out based on my own mood.
If you’re not into the Peloton app or you want to shop around, there is another I recommend but don’t personally use frequently: Les Mills+. It provides cardio and strength classes with straightforward instruction and plenty of beats, plus it contains quality educational material that can help you understand what you’re doing on your fitness journey. Check out my full review and my breakdown of how it differs from Peloton.
For strength training: Strong
Peloton also has a Strength+ app that I enjoy, but if I had to choose between that or Strong as my preferred weight-lifting helper, I’d go with Strong. Available on iOS and Android, the app relatively bare-bones, which is why I like it. It keeps track of my lifts, allowing me to enter the exercise I’m doing, the weight I’m using, how many sets and reps I’m doing, and whether or not I do a drop set or train to failure. It then keeps track of all that information so the next time I go to do, say, a lat pulldown, Strong tells me how many reps and sets I did last time and what weight I used.
Credit: Lindsey Ellefson
I used to keep track of this information in a note on my phone, then move it into a spreadsheet when I got home. This was unbelievably ineffective. Strong keeps track of the frequency of my workouts, links to my Apple Health seamlessly (which is a benefit I also appreciate from the Peloton app), and comes with extra features I don’t even use, like a tab to jot down the circumference of various body parts as they ideally grow and change. I happily pay $29.99 per year to unlock unlimited custom routines, but you can use the free version if all you want is to mark down a few details about your workouts.
For nutrition: Lifesum
I am a Millennial woman and, as such, have put in my time in the MyFitnessPal trenches for well over a decade. That app has had its claws in my generation for far too long and a few months ago, I finally broke free when I switched over to Lifesum. It was like a totally different world.
MFP has had and still has a lot of features that nutrition pros and eating disorder advocates worry are a little dangerous, like a pop-up notification that tells you what you’d weigh in five weeks if you consistently ate the same amount of calories you ate that day and numbers that turn red when you’ve exceeded your calorie goal for the day. Lifesum, on iOS and Android, is much gentler and is focused more on whole nutrition than calories. When I exceed my calorie goal for the day, there is no red number making me feel bad; the pastel rainbow background is as soothing and encouraging as it is on a day I eat at my goal. If I input a food that is, say, high in fat or calories, though, the app does show me a frowny emoji. If I input something nutritious, I am rewarded with a smiley face. These are much less intimidating than red numbers and they still keep me on track just fine.
Credit: Lindsey Ellefson
When you sign up for Lifesum, you take a quiz to get a “life score” and it asks you about how much you tend to eat from different categories, like seafood and fruit. You set macronutrient goals, activity goals, and calorie goals, but the app isn’t pushy if you don’t meet them on a given day. You are not rewarded for maintaining a “streak.” The whole thing is so pleasant that it actually encourages me to use it, which is hardly a difficult chore because Lifesum gives you plenty of options for use: I have a widget on my home screen that lets me input water intake and track my macros without opening the app, I can use my camera lens as a barcode scanner or to snap a pic of my meal and let the app estimate the calories, or I can type what I ate into an AI chatbox and allow it to estimate my calories and nutrients based off that. These are not perfect calculations, of course, and it only works well if you’re super specific in your descriptions, but it’s almost freeing to not be bound by extreme strictness. My Apple Health data, including my workouts and my weight, is entered in for me and Lifesum adjusts my recommended intakes based on that information and the goals I set. It’s $99.99 per year, $29.99 every three months, or $7.49 per month.
Other phone-based fitness considerations
I like to let my phone and other devices do a lot of work for me when I can, so I’m constantly wearing my Apple Watch, which delivers data on how much I’m walking, standing, moving, sleeping, and generally exerting straight to my Apple Health app, which in turn spreads that information over to Lifesum and my other apps. All the apps listed here connect seamlessly with my Apple Health app, which is important to me; I want everything in one place and all of it working together in sync.
I also use a smart scale to weigh myself and that, too, delivers information for Apple Health to spread around. You can absolutely get too into monitoring your own progress and fitness, so I recommend only getting these sorts of devices if you can exercise some reasonable caution. But overall, the ability to track and access data without doing too much work is really helpful. This is the scale I use, and I love it:
After I weigh myself, that weight is recorded in Apple Health and distributed to the other apps, making it easier for Peloton to make accurate estimates of my burned calories based on my weight, easier for Lifesum to make estimates of my nutritional needs based on it, etc.
All of this said, you don’t want to spend too much time fiddling with your phone—especially during mealtime or when you’re at the gym. The apps above are not time-suckers; Lifesum, especially, works quickly thanks to its barcode scanner and picture-assessing capabilities.
Still, don’t get so wrapped up in tracking and planning that you neglect the actual eating or exercising. If you’re spending a little too much time poring over your nutrition app or scrolling fitness influencers’ pages without actually replicating the exercises they’re showing you, check out the Steppin app, which works with your phone’s pedometer and blocks pre-determined apps, only letting you access them if you are willing to trade time you earned by walking.
