If you’re trying to lose weight, improve your fitness, eat better, or reduce your stress, your iPhone can be a helpful tool when paired with the right app — or apps. We scoured the landscape to find the best iPhone apps to help you stay healthy and fit, regardless of your schedule.
If you’re focused on running, have a look at our picks for the best running apps that you can match up with one of the best fitness trackers. If you’re looking for a great pair of headphones to hear your tunes as you move along, check out our picks of the best running headphones.
We’ve looked at a variety of fitness apps in categories like weight loss, running, yoga, strength training, and health and wellness and chose the best ones out there.
Do you have an Android phone? We have you covered too, with our picks of the best fitness apps for Android.
Weight loss
Sometimes, the prospective health benefits of exercise aren’t enough to get you out the door or on the trail. The apps below are designed to give you another compelling reason, whether it’s the opportunity to earn virtual badges, a chance to win actual prizes, or simply the prospect of looking better in your clothes and feeling better in your own skin.
Nike Training Club
Nike’s official app has a library of 30- to 45-minute workouts based on your goals and fitness level, available free of charge. Nike has partnered with Nike Master Trainers to deliver workouts and programs that cover sleep, recovery, and mindset. You’ll also get access to on-demand classes and whiteboard workouts for gym-style training. The app explains how to execute each exercise with how-to videos and even lets you share your accomplishments on social networks. Nike updates this app frequently, so you’ll now see free Medball Crush and Straight-Up Abs on the roster, as well as new expert tips about weight training and yoga. Updaters now allow you to schedule your workouts and set reminders. Select a date and time, and we’ll send you notifications before your workout so you can get ready.
Carrot Fit
Carrot is an artificial intelligence construct that threatens, inspires, ridicules, and bribes — whatever it takes — to get you moving. It’s an ironic motivator that features a seven-minutes-in-hell workout that dictates 30 seconds of 12 punishing exercises — and will berate you if you don’t. Warning: If you stray from your weight goals too much, it will upset Carrot, whereupon she will call you nasty names and make you cry. So be a good, fat, lazy meatbag, okay?
Argus: Calorie Counter & Step Tracker
Argus is an all-in-one meal planner and activity tracker that monitors your sleep, heart rate, calories, and more. The app offers fitness challenges, as well as the option to build your own workout plan. You can also add the food you eat by scanning the barcode on the label to track your calories.
Lose It!
Lose It tracks food intake and fitness activities. Enter your height, weight, age, and weight goals, and the app recommends an ideal net calorie intake. Updated versions feature a redesigned and simplified camera that combines the barcode scanner and food image recognition into a single view. The app also added saturated fat to its premium tracker and sends recipe ingredients as separate food items to the Apple Health App. Just point the camera at a barcode or a food item and it recognizes it, logging the nutritional details. A button on the log screen helps you add meals. You can now set a fixed calorie budget that won’t change, and hide meal targets on the Log Screen via Meal Settings.
MyFitnessPal
Calorie Counter and Diet Tracker by MyFitnessPal features a database of more than 11 million foods, making it easier to track what you eat. It also features a step tracker and a barcode scanner so you can track everything in your diet. The app helps you keep a food diary to understand your habits, scan barcodes, save meals and recipes, and use its Quick Tools for easy food tracking. It also helps you stay motivated with its fitness community available for advice, tips, and support.
Lifesum: Diet & Macro Tracker
Lifesum is a weight loss app that works with apps from Withings, FitBit, and RunKeeper for an accurate assessment of your daily calorie intake. It features a built-in barcode scanner that can pull up nutritional data on millions of food items. Now, all your historical data for exercise, water tracking, and habit tracking is accessible regardless of when you recorded it. A Sugar Detox Meal Plan helps you cut back on sugar. There’s also support for Voice control, Apple’s dark mode, and Sign In With Apple. Views are simplified, allowing you to access information easily on both your iPhone and Apple Watch.
Pokémon Go
This isn’t a traditional weight loss app, sure, but many hail Pokémon Go as one of the best ways to get off the couch and into the wild. Regardless of who you are, you’ll find yourself walking all over your city to find new Pokémon. Get ready for the spookiest month of the year with GO Halloween and costumed Pokémon to a tie-in event with Pokémon the Movie: Secrets of the Jungle. You can now zoom in and out while in the style menu for a better view of your avatar’s outfit, alongside new Nickname suggestions and updated gameplay tips.
Cyclemeter
If cycling is your preferred fitness routine, this is the app for you, especially if you want to shed some weight on a bicycle instead of a treadmill. Cyclemeter is accurate and great at collecting data. It can also track various walking and running metrics. Now Cyclemeter can record workouts on your Apple Watch. Two recording modes are available. With Record on Apple Watch, workouts are recorded on the Apple Watch, and automatically transfer to your workout history when you launch the app. If your Apple Watch has cell access or your iPhone is nearby, you can live track using Friends, send email updates, and use Siri to control workouts. With Record on iPhone, you can use your Apple Watch to control iPhone recording. You need to take your iPhone with you on your workouts in this mode.
WW Weight Watchers Reimagined
The Weight Watchers official app promises to help you on your journey to a healthier lifestyle by tracking and sharing your weight loss progress with friends. The app makes it easy to keep track of your food intake with point values. The free app is compatible with the Apple Watch, but you need to subscribe to Weight Watchers Online if you want to make the most of it. You can choose meal planning tools and personalized recipe recommendations, recipe suggestions, coaching audio sessions, sleep tracking, and bedtime routines, and weekly check-in, progress report, and personalized action plan. The app recently partnered with Breethe, a meditation and mental wellness app for relaxing meditations, bedtime stories, and calming sounds.
Running
Running is the foundation of countless activities in athletics — whether it be soccer, Frisbee, or football. It’s also one of the most minimalist sports in existence, essentially requiring nothing more than your free will, a desire to run, and, hopefully, a good pair of running shoes. The following apps are designed to make the most of your running capabilities by charting and mapping your progress.
Fit Radio
Music is a powerful workout companion, and Fit Radio is a streaming service specifically built for maintaining a constant rhythm while you work out. A premium subscription costs $8 a month, but there is also a free subscription available if you don’t mind ads and a limited feature set. Regardless, you will be able to select music based on a genre, your desired BPM, or a specific workout routine (spinning, Zumba). Full Strength programs are now free, and an enhanced music experience lets you better explore and customize all the music in the app. Newer versions feature full streaming capabilities for Apple Watches with data plans, plus you can now create custom nicknames, save mixes, and send mixes to your Apple Watch.
Strava: Run, Ride, Swim
Strava is an excellent tracking app that monitors your runs or cycling routes via GPS. It also gamifies your cardio workout and pairs with leaderboards, achievements, and challenges to bring a competitive spirit to your routine. The app has rolled out Beacon on Apple Watch so you can now share real-time location and track your live stats right from your wrist. Those with access to the route builder can now draw routes and append them with multiple gestures. Apple Watch recording performance is also improved. New versions feature personal heatmaps on mobile so you can see past and plan future locations. It lets you personalize your activity map to show surface type with either paved or unpaved terrain.
Zombies, Run!
In this story-based workout app, you are Runner 5. Your mission: To help rebuild civilization by retrieving critical supplies outside of your virtual base. The app keeps track of your distance as the story and instructions play out — but fear not, you can still listen to your music as you run. Newer versions feature 50% longer mission durations and added base materials to the Season 1 Race Missions wrapped in a redesigned the Missions screen.
Runkeeper — GPS Running Tracker
Runkeeper uses GPS to map your runs while logging speed and distance. You set goals, then get audio distance and time updates during the run. There’s great music integration — you can listen to your favorite playlist and switch tracks within the app. It shows a variety of real-time information and is compatible with the Apple Watch. You can access plans on the Training tab with a Runkeeper Go subscription. You can enjoy Race Mode audio cues to virtual races for race-specific audio cues for the event you’re participating in. It’s easy to select from a list of multiple teams and segments if you’ve registered for the same virtual relay race more than once. Relay race participants can now easily invite friends to their team while team captains can use the app to make lineup changes, and it is now easier to obtain race-specific audio cues for virtual races.
Charity Miles
You can run for charity with this app. Running this app before beginning your exercise routine will earn 25 cents per mile for your selected charity (cyclists earn 10 cents per mile). You will, however, have to share your activity on Facebook for the charities to receive the donations. You can now create your own pledge page and let your friends sponsor your miles, and you can earn an unlimited amount of money per mile. You can also sync with Strava and Health Kit (and any connected devices) to turn all your miles into money for charity.
Map My Run
This app accurately tracks distance and pace, and it also gives a robust workout summary that you can save and share. Plus, the app counts calories burned and charts your elevation profile. The best part: You can control music and incoming calls while in the app. The newest versions let you share gym routines with friends and find them in the feed, add more exercises, and let UA HOVR Connected Footwear users earn badges based on the types of workouts and how much you run. All athletes on training plans can now see interval splits on their workout details. The developer announced it plans to remove Nearby Routes and Route Genius from the app to focus on different features.
C25K 5K Trainer
Great for beginners, C25K is specifically designed to train non-runners for a 5K run. It promises to get you there in just eight weeks, as long as you stick to the scheduled runs three times a week. The app provides a training plan that has a mix of running and walking, and it has seamless integration with MyFitnessPal, so you can track your calories as well. New improvements include an easy-to-access Apple Watch complication shortcut, improved calories, distance, steps accuracy from Apple Watch syncing, and improved social media sharing.
Get active with your favorite sports like running, hiking, cycling, yoga, and more. Keep a log of minutes, miles and calories burned and see your statistics. The app offers built-in GPS tracking, rack duration, distance, calories burned, and monitor heart rate data, and virtual races with athletes around the world. choose a personal goal for the sport of your choice and the score activity feature records when you hit a new milestone. Use your Apple Watch to track activities and upload data to adidas Running. The premium version — for $10 per month or $50 per year — gives you personalized training plans for races, interval training for running, walking and cycling, personal records to track your progress, and auto-pause for when you stop moving.
Nike Run Club
This is the ultimate running partner. Not only will Nike Run Club give you the GPS tracking of your run, but it also provides guided running workouts. Enjoy weekly and monthly distance challenges to keep you motivated and the voice of a coach that will keep you off the couch. New versions offer enhanced run details where you can view more post-run metrics in your activity summary, including cadence, fastest mile, and more. Apple Watch improvements include run level cover, an updated Quick Start selector, and more personalized Challenge leaderboards. New NRC widgets display your run stats on the iPhone home screen. Show your colors with the Run Level widget, and see your post-run progress with the Last Run widget.
Yoga
The great thing about yoga apps is how applicable yoga is to all sorts of scenarios, whether you’re looking for a way to alleviate stress, recover from an injury, or build muscular strength for your next endeavor. The selection of apps below will allow you to learn the poses and positions while presenting all the necessary knowledge you may need to become a true practitioner.
Daily Yoga
Geared toward beginners, this app offers short classes with accompanying music, along with a library of different poses and exercise routines. More advanced features and courses require a subscription. Updated features include a new series of Fat Burner for Beginners exercises designed to burn calories, Relaxing Moment for after-practice relaxation, and Smart Coach, with 30 personalized workout plans to help you reach your goal. There are plenty of updates for recent versions, including Soma Yoga & Yin Yoga, Yoga for Chronic Fatigue Program, Beginner Warm-up, Beginner Easy Flow, and Beginner Abs Strengthening. There’s also a new practice record sharing function, letting you share and record your yoga practice with more friends.
Simply Yoga
Perfect for beginners, Simply Yoga guides you through a series of streaming videos lasting between 20 minutes and an hour that cover more than 35 poses, complete with audio and video instructions, that you can do in the privacy of your own home. The app integrates with Health app and workout and calories burned get pushed to the Health app.
Pocket Yoga
With more than 200 illustrated poses and detailed voice instructions, the $3 Pocket Yoga is a guide that will run down poses and exercises. Additionally, you can preview various practices and play your own music. The app will log progress every step of the way. The app now displays the Apple Watch app icon and offers a new “Pose of the Day” that helps you learn a new pose every day directly from your home screen.
Yoga Studio: Poses & Classes
Featuring dozens of individual classes, ranging from 10 to 60 minutes at a number of difficulty levels, Yoga Studio guides you through poses with HD video classes. It has a robust catalog of more than 280 free poses, which should be enough for most people. You also get more than 15 two-hour meditations and relaxation practices that help center your mind, body and soul with tracking from Apple’s mindful minutes’ integration. The app also offers nearly 200 ready-made yoga videos and meditations with frequent class updates, or you can customize or create your own unique HD video classes with your favorite poses. It now works on the Mac in addition to Apple’s mobile devices. After a seven-day trial period, subscriptions range from $10 to $100.
5 Minute Yoga
Not enough time in the day for a short yoga session? This app wants to help by offering yoga activities that last five minutes. The barebones app is good for beginners, as it offers simple poses with a timer to make sure you’re doing them for five minutes. You now have the choice of a subscription or a one-time purchase for $16.
Strength training
Cardio exercises are great, but if you want to look like you’re working out, you gotta do the heavy lifting. Regardless of how you look, lifting weights can be dangerous if you don’t know the proper techniques. Fortunately, the apps below offer more than enough information on your body’s various muscle groups and the methods for interacting with the equipment lining the walls and floor of your local gym.
GymBook
GymBook is a visually attractive app that tracks your strength workouts. You can create your own routines, but the app displays neat GIFs of 50 preset exercises and how they affect the different muscle groups. In the recent release, developers made the setting Default log available on the Apple Watch. Setting the log to ‘Last time’ now pre-fills the pickers on GymBook for Apple Watch with the log from the last time.
StrongLifts Weight Lifting Log
Strong Lifts Weight Lifting Log is one of the best ways to gain muscle and lose fat, but it’s probably too intense for inexperienced lifters. The app coaches you through three 45-minute workouts a week, focusing on the largest muscles in your body for optimal effect. The new version offers several updates to the Graphs, making it easier to review progress and boost motivation. Updates include increments to set how often to add weight after all sets are completed and to deaload after a certain number of fails.
Strong Workout Tracker Gym Log
This workout-tracking app lets you easily enter information about your session. Hitting certain milestones unlocks achievements, and the app lets you add your own routines to your workouts. It also has a range of cardio exercises, but the app’s primary focus is on progressive barbell routines. You can start a brand new Start Workout screen, with folders to organize your routines; drag-and-drop routines; drag-and-drop custom folders; collapsible sections; and, for the Apple Watch, routines are now organized under folders. You can also start an empty workout with Siri by saying, “Hey Siri, start a workout with Strong,” and customize your Apple Watch settings to show heart rate or duration during your workout.
Jefit Workout Planner Gym Log
Designed for bodybuilders, Jefit keeps track of your reps, sets, and the weight you’re lifting. Jefit provides a number of different workout routines designed to target specific muscle groups and allows you to design custom workouts. The app features a Jefit series of home-based exercise routines from one to four weeks long, some of which focus on utilizing bodyweight only, while others require equipment. A messaging/chatroom system reveals activity and sharing of routines among friends, coaches, or clients. The most recent version lets you create your own audio exercise tips while your are performing your workouts. The app now recommends routines based on your training logs, home or gym environment, and onboarding information. The app now displays a list of gyms nearby your location. When you add a local gym, you get added to that gym’s public chat room so you can communicate with other Jefit users there.
Health and wellness
Though these aren’t necessarily apps for exercise, the proper amount of sleep and relaxation is crucial to living a healthy lifestyle. Pair it with weekly workouts and you are set. Make sure you’re getting the most out of your shuteye with these apps.
Sleep Cycle Sleep Tracker
Set your phone on your mattress, and it goes to work while you’re sleeping. It provides metrics that give you a snapshot of your sleep quality and has a fantastic alarm function. The app will wake you when you are in your lightest sleep, ensuring you wake feeling well-rested. Free features include sleep analysis, detailed sleep statistics and daily sleep graphs, curated alarm melodies, snooze by shaking or double tapping the phone lightly. It’s integrated with Apple Health for sleep analysis and heart rate.
Sleep Bug
For some, background noise is crucial for a good night’s sleep. This app‘s slick interface offers a wide variety of ambient noises, ranging from busy city streets and babbling brooks to campfires and torrential downpours. As one of the top rated white noise machines available, it provides 24 scenes, 83 sound effects and more than 300 different sounds so everyone will find something to meet their needs.
Pzizz — Sleep, Nap, Focus
Pzizz creates a different soundtrack every time you use it for sleeping, napping, or focus. These are designed to keep the app from becoming too familiar. The app uses a randomization algorithm that gives it more than 100 billion different sounds. Most are binaural beats and tones that help induce a state of relaxation. Updates include new narration genres, including Sleep Meditations, Sleepy Stories, Sleep Journeys, and Dreamy Myths with more than two voices for each narration. Favorites will now take into account all of your selected settings with the ability to save highly customized sessions with AirPlay surrport. You can even ‘dislike’ a narrator, dreamscape, or narration.
Headspace
This app aims to make meditation simple so that you can improve your focus and relieve anxiety. It starts at the foundation level, which teaches you the basics in 10 meditation exercises that are each 10 minutes long. The app tracks your progress, and there is a buddy system where you and your friends can motivate each other. Headspace offers two subscriptions: Chose either $13 per month or $70 per year. This app is also compatible with the Apple Watch.
Sanvello Anxiety & Depression
This is an excellent app for recording your daily moods to manage your stress and well-being adequately. The app provides you with the tools you need to break the cycle of whatever is stressing you out so you can reach your goals one step at a time. There are many deep breathing exercises, positive visualizations, and meditations paired with relaxing background noises. An integrated health tracker drives you toward your everyday health goals. The app is free, but you must pay $9 a month or $54 per year to access all features. You get the latest educational content based on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and an updated home screen with immersive content and experience choices. A new recommended feature assists you in selecting the activity best suited for you. The newest version improves the look and feel of the app’s Communities, a space where you can vent, get support, and commiserate with others.
7 Cups Anxiety & Stress Chat
This app helps you manage depression and stress, offering 24/7 support and enabling you to chat with someone one-on-one whenever you need to. The app offers over 450,000 trained listeners and licensed therapists in 189 countries and in 140 languages. Each listener has a profile with reviews and specialty categories, such as panic attacks and bullying or eating disorders, surviving a breakup, and more. Try a new listener each time, or pick one listener and develop a relationship. The app is free to download, but premium subscriptions start at $13 per month or $95 per year.
Relax Melodies
If you ever felt like you needed a good night’s sleep, this app may be your solution. The app features 124 sounds and melodies for unlimited ambiances, brainwaves frequencies for specific states of sleep. community melodies with member mixes, and more. You can choose from different sounds and melodies to build your own mix and then join them with a meditation exercise to help you relax and fall asleep peacefully. The app lets you design alarms so that you can use them as your alarm clock. It can also run in the background, so it won’t stop working even if you close the app. Subscriptionc cost $10 per month or $25 for three months.
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