Getting Started with Weight Loss and Fitness: The Best Apps to Track Your Fitness Goals in 2021
Getting Started with Weight Loss and Fitness
One of the things I hear the most when it comes to my weight loss and fitness progress is how do I start? What do I do? Is there an app out there that can help? What should I focus on? - While there’s no set routine, or diet that will work for everyone, there are certain things you can do to get started in the right direction. In this multi-part series of blog posts, I’m going to cover the things I did to get started on my journey, the apps, and gadgets that helped me along the way, and the hard lessons I learned during my journey. If you’re looking for advice on supplements you can check out my blog post on The best supplements I’ve used to burn fat, lose weight and gain lean muscle by clicking here.
The Best Apps to Track Your Fitness Goals in 2021
The Apps
Best Overall App: My Fitness Pal
Best Workout Tracker: Strong App
Apple Watch App for Zone Training: Zones For Training
Best Quick/Body Weight Workout App: 7 Minute Workout by Johnson & Johnson
Best Yoga Service: Glo
Best App for Finding New Exercises: Full Fitness
The Apps
One of the first things I learned about weight loss was no matter how much I lifted or how much I worked out if my nutrition wasn’t right, it really wouldn’t matter. I would spend literally hours in the gym, but I’d get home and “reward” myself with ridiculous meals that I thought were “healthy” but as it turns out, they were anything but healthy.
When it comes to weight loss, nutrition plays a huge part, more than you would think. About 80% of it is nutrition and the rest is your weight training or cardio routines. It’s also very important to note that the key here is going to be consistency, my good friend and personal trainer Hans told me this and it has stuck ever since, it takes 21 days to make a habit and 90 days to make it a lifestyle. This is a great rule of thumb but keep in mind everyone is different and it can take people up to 200 days to fully form a new habit, the takeaway here is: commit to it. No matter what, just commit. This is where a lot of these apps come in handy. You can use them to track your nutrition, set notifications, and reminders to help you get off the couch, compete against yourself to achieve your next PR (Personal Record), the list goes on.
Photograph by Andrew Harrer—Bloomberg/Getty Images
My Fitness Pal
My Fitness Pal is one of the best and most robust apps available when it comes to fitness and lifestyle changes. If there’s a single app I would recommend above all others, this is the one. My Fitness Pal is known for the ability to easily log your daily caloric intake with a built-in database of over 6 million foods (and counting) and accurately give you a breakdown of your Macronutrients along with more detailed information like net carbs, fiber, cholesterol, and sodium intake among other nutritional info. You can input your meals by either searching the database, scanning the barcode or, as of a recent update, by taking a picture of the individual items on your plate (I.E. an apple, a piece of bread, etc.). In addition to logging meals, it logs exercise stats, helps you change your habits to meet personal health goals, has a ton of workouts, recipes, and offers unparalleled customization for each of its assets.
It integrates with more than 50 apps and devices to sync all of your workouts, and it has a library of over 350 cardio and strength sessions if you need a jumping-off point.
My Fitness Pal also includes a restaurant logger that will guarantee no calorie goes uncounted when you go out to eat. It has enough features to fill this entire list, while just about all the features included with the app are free, there’s a premium plan that in my experience is worth the price to unlock the apps full potential.
Strong App
Before I started using the Strong App, I was logging my workouts with the old-fashioned notebook and a pen and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that for the majority of the people out there who are just starting out. No matter what I would recommend keeping some kind of journal with a date, the exercises performed, start and end time, weight lifted, and your rep count. This will help you keep track of your progress and give you something to aim for on your next workout. It will also help you remember what days you worked what muscle groups and plan your workouts so you can create a well-rounded workout routine. For people who want to take their tracking to a higher level, the Strong app is a perfect way of doing it. Strong lets you build workout routines with an extensive list of classic and well-known exercises, but if you’re like me and you do research online for your routines, you can create a new exercise pretty easily. The app is super user-friendly, it tracks everything from your 1RM (1 Rep Max), to your Personal Records, muscle growth, strength improvements, and so on. I’ve been using the Strong app for almost two years and it’s helped me tremendously. Plus, if you’re like me, and you leave your friggin notebook somewhere on a layover, you don’t have to worry about losing any information because the app is cloud-based and syncs after every workout.
Zones for Training
As the name implies this app focuses on Zone Training. What is zone training? To put it simply, zone training focuses on workouts that keep your heart rate in a specific “zone” to maximize weight loss or fitness. Your training plan can (and should) include workouts in all five zones. This HR zones chart shows the level of intensity and percentage of Maximum Heart Rate used in each one.
Zone 1: Very Light - 50% - 60% Of Your Maximum Heart Rate
Zone 2: Light - 60% - 70% Of Your Maximum Heart Rate
Zone 3: Moderate - 70% - 80% Of Your Maximum Heart Rate
Zone 4: Hard - 80% - 90% Of Your Maximum Heart Rate
Zone 5: Maximum - 90% - 100% Of Maximum Your Heart Rate
Zone training has become even more popular in the last few years with entire gyms dedicating themselves to focusing purely on zone training, gyms like Orange Theory, which was founded in 2010 and over the last 11 years have grown to over 1200 studios in all 50 states and 23 countries. I could probably write an entire blog post on zone training but for now, those who want to start learning about it can use this app which pairs really well with apple watch users.
7 Minute Workout by J&J
If you’re like me, your schedule is insanely busy. On top of that, being an airline crew member, I never know what type of gym to expect when I’m on layover, hotel gyms vary wildly from having full blown professional gyms to having a treadmill and a thrown together set of 25 year old dumbbells that only go up to 40lbs. Even worse, sometimes I’m getting off the hotel shuttle van only to realize I have to be back at the airport in less than 10 hours. No matter how short my layover is or how busy my day has gotten, I know I have at least 7 minutes. That’s the concept behind the 7M workout apps. A performance coach and exercise physiologist from the Human Performance Institute in Orlando, FL, came up with this program to give their busy clients a more efficient yet still effective workout. They've put together a series of 12 different exercises that work the upper body, lower body, and core. It’s important to note that this is not a magical elixir that will suddenly transform your body into that perfect bikini ready summer bod. This is a good compliment to your workout routine when you have nothing but your bodyweight and only a little while to work out. You can manage intensity and if you happen to have say 30 minutes at your disposal, you can run the app more than once to get in a longer workout. Typically the exercises last for about 30 seconds and the rest between sets is about 5 seconds so it elevates your heart rate, gets your blood flowing and burns a few calories off which is always beneficial no matter what your day is like. This is also a great way to warm up your whole body before you get your real daily workout in.
Glo Yoga App
For the beginner or the advanced yogi, Glo is not only an awesome app but also a full-blown yoga class service. They offer classes on multiple platforms so you can switch from your phone to your computer browser to your tablet. Glo starts around $18 a month and gives you the option to personalize your classes and styles with a quick questionnaire so you can choose the exact intensity you’re looking for. They also offer live classes during the week so you can actually interact with a real person and not just a recording. Since I’m a total yoga noob that had no idea what I was doing, Glo was perfect.
Full Fitness : Exercise Workout Trainer
We’ve all been there, you just started working out, you know how to do 3 or 4 exercises, you look around and see an ocean of equipment, barbells, dumbbells, kettlebells, cowbells, smith machines, squat racks… Ok, maybe not cowbell, but there’s a ton of gym equipment you have never used before and your brain immediately goes into a total panic attack because you don’t want to look foolish but you also have no idea what you’re doing. Enter the Full Fitness App. This app was a tremendous help when I was just getting started again in the gym. It had been years since I did any type of lifting and my experience came mostly from the ROTC and sports training and it had been ages since I did any of that. Full Fitness gives you the ability to narrow down what muscle group you want to workout and then select what type of equipment you have at your disposal, including bodyweight exercises, on top of that there’s an image demonstrating how to perform the exercise and you can also click to see a video clip of someone actually performing it. While this app has plenty of other features like logging workout routines and a handful of fitness programs, I used it mostly to learn what I could do with the equipment I had at hand. This helped me avoid being that person that’s ping-ponging around the gym aimlessly without a plan and looking lost while trying to play it off cool like I know what I’m doing there.
Pros and Cons of Fitness Apps
Fitness apps can be very beneficial to your overall routine when you consider they can help you track your exercise achievements, caloric burn, nutrition, and overall progress which helps keep you motivated and gives you a chance to compete against yourself and set a target to shoot for which has been super beneficial during my journey to losing weight and getting into the best shape I’ve ever been in. They also give you the opportunity to “get your feet wet” with fitness if you’re not ready to commit to a gym or personal trainer, although they will never replace the knowledge or hands-on benefits of having a dedicated trainer if you can afford it. On the downside, if you rely too heavily on fitness apps, you’re missing out on the other great benefits from working out like social interaction, shared experiences, camaraderie, and personalized feedback that you’d get in the gym or in group classes. If you’re a person that’s tied to your phone, working out also gives you the opportunity to take a break from the digital world so the last thing you want is to dive even deeper into never putting your phone down.
How much do fitness apps cost?
The price for fitness apps varies pretty greatly, there are apps that are free to download, but unlocking their full potential requires some form of payment. This can be a one-time $2-$10 fee or in some cases a yearly(MyFitnessPal) or even monthly(Yoga Glo) subscription that can be anywhere between $20-$40.
The Bottom Line
While fitness apps are great and certainly should be looked at when you’re starting your fitness routines, it ultimately comes down to what you’re expectations are and your level of motivation. If you’re a self-starter that doesn't need someone to tell them when to work out, you’re highly motivated and ready to start working out right now, these apps can provide a jumping-off point to get you started. If you need that extra push, no workout app will ever replace the type of motivation you’ll get from someone who is financially inclined to get you the results you want. Regardless, some apps like MyFitnessPal should be incorporated into everyone’s routines because it gives you one of the most crucial parts of weight loss and fitness, which is tracking nutrition.
If you’re someone who is busy, can’t get on a regular gym schedule, and needs help with things you can do at home or without a gym membership, some of the apps above are worth the look.
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