Fitness at your fingertips

If you are thinking of embarking on the fitness journey to work off all that lockdown weight or are already on board, here are a number of exercise apps that can be your best friend. They will give you a pretty decent workout experience and enable you to analyse your performance, so make sure to check them out.

Map My fitness

This is especially good for the novices who are just about to start their exercising journey. Its specialty is that it can track any physical activity you do — walking, running, cycling, dancing, swimming, to even walking your dog or vacuuming the house.

Whenever you are about to start an activity, all you have to do is launch the app and start the recorder to see how much calories you have burnt.

Map my fitness is a free app but upgrading to MVP membership gives you advantages like measuring your heat rate. This app works with Apple watch, Android Wear, Garmin devices, Samsung Gear, and many others. 

Map My Run and Map My Walk

As the names suggest, these apps are designed for runners and walkers, respectively. You can fix and customise your route for running or walking, then track how much of the activities you did and how much calories you burnt in the process.

Runkeeper

This tracks how much you have run, walked or cycled, by using your device's GPS sensors. A key feature of this app is that it gives the user certain challenges (Runkeeper Challenge) periodically like completing a certain workout in a given time limit. You can know your distance travelled, speed, pace, etc. after your workout.

Walkmeter

Hailed as the most advanced app for walkers, Walkmeter is a must-have item for walkers or hikers. This app is not only limited to outdoor activities as it records data of your speed and pace when you are at your treadmill and cycling trainer. It can measure your heart rate using Apple Watch or any Bluetooth fitness tracker with a heartrate sensor.

My Swim Pro

Good news for all the swimmers out there because My Swim Pro has got your back.

This app has videos and tutorials for the best and most effective ways for you to improve your swimming skills. Not only does it teach you how to improve your freestyle strokes, but also has dryland training in store, which are exercises you can do outside the pool to greatly enhance your swimming.

Smartwatch and fitness band users can track their swimming by connecting to the app and thus monitor their performance live.

MyFitnessPal

This has been designed specifically to track diet. You can scan the barcodes of your food items or simply use the app's database to see how many calories you are consuming. The app's database has nutritional information of any kind of food or ingredient and shows you the calorie per serving.

All of the above-mentioned apps are free and can be used by both Apple and Android users.

Photo: Collected