Summary
- Google Fit is a comprehensive fitness tracking app that counts calories, maps walks/runs, tracks heart rate, and monitors sleep.
- Strava combines fitness tracking with social media features, allowing users to share their activities and compete with others.
- Nike Run Club offers guided runs, coached exercise regimens, and GPS tracking for walkers and runners. It’s a great app for progress and coaching.
Jumpstarting a daily routine to get your life in order is sometimes more complicated than it needs to be. Healthy living is about keeping your mental well-being and physical fitness in check. Still, sometimes we need to figure out where to begin and how to maintain our fitness, which is why we turn to external help from some of the best apps on Android. Apps enable healthy habits like exercise routines and guided meditations, record our daily progress, and showcase how close we are to meeting those goals. This is why we’ve inspected some of the best fitness and health apps available on Android that you can link to your favorite smartwatch or phone to hit the ground running.
1 Google Fit
When it comes to getting a clearer picture of your overall health, counting out expended calories, utilizing GPS to map your walks/runs, and gauging your heartbeat over time, almost no app does it better than Google Fit. Not only is Google Fit the default fitness tracking option on Wear OS smartwatches, but it’s also one of the most well-rounded solutions in the Android ecosystem. The app uses a unique “move minutes” tracking system that gauges how many complete minutes you’re in motion throughout the day. It also marks down “heart points,” which account for more rigorous exercises, such as brisk walks, runs, etc.
In addition to these metrics, Fit keeps a log of your steps walked, distance traveled, and calories expended. It also tracks heart rate, weight, and how much sleep you’ve acquired.
2 Strava
Strava is a hybrid app that blends its fitness roots with a unique social media element, encouraging users to share their activities and progress with other Strava participants. On the fitness side, the app taps into GPS to map walks/runs, bike rides, and it can even track swims. An included Explore tab helps users find fitness events in their area, user-generated challenges, and more. Users can also set weekly and annual goals to keep them motivated over time. On the social side, users are encouraged to connect with friends, post content to their activity feeds (Ã la Facebook), and even compete with one another.
3 Nike Run Club
The Nike Run Club app fits in a similar vein as Strava, where you rely on the app to track your steps for your activities, but with an emphasis on walking and running. Users can tap into their devices’ GPS to map their walks/runs, download free guided runs, and partake in long-term coached exercise regimens. So if you’re looking for another app that supports your progress, and provides coaching, then Nike Run Club is the perfect app for you.
4 Walk with Map My Walk
Walk with Map My Walk app has you creating customizable training plans, receiving coaching tips, and joining challenges with a community. The app is versatile whether you exercise near your home or on a daily route. You can upgrade to the MVP premium tier if you prefer personalized coaching and more tools for your training plans. It lets you sync with various apps and wearables like Google Fit, Garmin, and Android Wear.
5 7 Minute Workout
Sometimes, you don’t have much time in your day for an extended workout session, but why feel guilty about missing out on getting your heart rate up? The 7 Minute Workout app follows the HICT (high-intensity circuit training) philosophy to jumpstart your cardiovascular system for the day. The app supports Google Fit, and you’ll have access to 12 exercises with each in less than a minute — all you need is access to a chair and a wall, perfect for when you’re in the office or at home.
6 FitOn
Take matters into your hands with your fitness goals. FitOn has a plethora of home exercises you can do, ranging from cardio, yoga, and Pilates. It’s the perfect app when trying to work up a sweat while working from home, or perhaps you prefer staying inside to going to the gym. It even offers 10-minute workouts when you’re short on time. FitOn has all the resources for all your exercise and stress management needs; get your heart rate up with your very own customizable workout plan, and use it to target specific parts of your body.
Not only does FitOn include workouts, but it has resources to help you manage your daily stress through guided meditations. FitOn is the perfect blend to reinforce your well-being; mental health is just as important as looking after your physical health.
7 Home Workout — No Equipment
If you’re looking for an app to zone in on your workout plan, Home Workout is one of the best apps you’ll find. The app asks you for your height and weight, so you can start building a personal profile to track your fitness routine. It includes exercises that don’t require equipment you can easily perform at home, including warmups and stretches, key ingredients to prevent accidental injuries.
The app offers daily reminders to help kick-start good habits for your daily exercise routines (yes, it is sometimes tempting to skip days from your workout). Home Workout doesn’t neglect your workout needs, from muscle building to strength training and target weight loss. Men even have a separate section for home workout options. Don’t miss out on your fitness goals with Home Workout!
8 Sleep as Android
Developing a healthier lifestyle is appropriately maintaining your sleep for better workouts, improved mental health, and reduced risk of diseases. One of the most prominent sleep tracking apps is Sleep As Android. Not only has it garnered a large user base, but it has also even earned Google’s prestigious Editor’s choice award.
The app can provide nightly stats on sleep quality, measure sleep trends over time, and it has an alarm feature that can wake users with a gentle vibration on the wrist and/or with a series of customizable sounds. After gathering enough data, Sleep As Android can also provide a sleep score to let users know how rested they are over time.
9 BetterSleep
BetterSleep is a sleep-tracking app recommended by leading doctors, neuropsychologists, and sleep experts. You gain insight into your sleep and learn about the science behind your sleeping patterns. But instead of being left out in the dust for improving sleep, the app has built-in sounds, music, and beats to help correct your sleeping. Over 300 sounds/music are available in the app’s library with variable frequencies to guide your sleep; you can even mix the patterns to find the perfect soundscape tailored to you.
But BetterSleep doesn’t just have a variety of sounds/music in its library; there are bedtime stories and a bountiful selection of sleep moves and breathing techniques to hone in on your bedtime routine. So never feel alone in trying to fix your sleeping habits again; BetterSleep is the perfect companion app to bring by your bedside.
10 My Fitness Pal
You cannot ignore your eating habits if you’re trying to become fit and adopt a healthier lifestyle. Knowing how many calories you ingest in a day will help you set up your daily exercise routine and set your unhealthy snacking habits straight. One of our favorite calorie-counter apps is My Fitness Pal. My Fitness Pal logs precisely what you’re eating by consulting a food library, scanning a barcode, and letting you manually input food items you’re about to digest.
You can also set up notifications for daily reminders to log your meals into the app. If logging your eating habits isn’t enough, My Fitness Pal also teaches you how to prepare healthier meals and stay connected socially to help your stay motivated.
11 FatSecret
While My Fitness Pal is the best all-in-one food tracker app, you might be looking for a simple and completely free (no premium membership needed) alternative for calorie-counting, which is what we have by using FatSecret. Like My Fitness Pal, you can still scan barcodes on products and use image recognition to record your meals.
You also have access to a journal, a calendar system, and a photo album to keep a record of all the progress you’ve made. FatSecret also supports integration with Google Fit, Samsung Health, and Fitbit, so you don’t have to worry about losing your records, no matter the main health app you use!
12 Calm
An underrated aspect of maintaining a healthier life is looking after your mental health. Our lives get busy, and it is often neglected we look after our well-being. So we turn to apps that help us refocus and meditate our minds; one of our personal favorites and an Editor’s choice is the Calm app. Within the app, you can swipe through several visual “scenes” that include environmental sounds to center yourself.
For added serenity, engage in guided breathing exercises, body stretches, meditation, or unlock masterclasses from mindfulness experts. The Calm app has everything you need to improve your mental health.
13 Headspace: Mindful Meditation
Headspace: Mindful Meditation is an excellent all-in-one app to help ease the mind through guided meditations, Yoga, mindfulness courses, and sleep sounds. The app is designed around your lifestyle (from a busy/packed schedule to a flexible/open schedule); enroll in meditation courses and discussion topics targeting anxiety, stress, and daily focus. A healthy mind is a healthy body with Mindful Meditation, after all. And maybe you prefer having access to everything from the get-go. In that case, the Mindful Meditation app has a subscription Headspace tier giving you the entire library of courses, exercises, and practices at your fingertips. But we still recommend checking out the free trial if you still need to determine whether this app has what you’re looking for to improve your headspace.
Take control of your health and fitness
Hopefully, we’ve provided a well-rounded list of the best Android apps that promote healthy living for both mind and body while still aiding your fitness goals. And sometimes, it takes trial and error to find an app that works with your lifestyle and provides the right motivation to see results in your daily sleeping, exercising, and meditation. But in the process of taking control of your health and fitness, neglecting your eating habits is a huge no-no if you’re trying to become the healthiest version of yourself, which is why you should refer to the best diet and nutrition tracking apps to add to your routine.