Fitness at Your Fingertips

As a smart and busy collegiette, you probably find yourself constantly on the move, buzzing from classes to meetings, to extracurriculars – and in doing so it may be difficult to keep up with your various fitness efforts. But don’t worry, regardless of what your goal is – there’s an app for it!

To save you time – and effort – I have made the mistakes for you, sifting through weird, non-user-friendly apps and health websites to give to a list of the must-haves of fitness apps for active collegiettes!

Weight Management

1. Lose It! – This is by far my favorite app on the market. With a database of hundreds of thousands of foods, both brand specific and not, Lose It! makes it simple for users to keep track of their meals and their exercise habits. Lose It! allows users to enter in their current weight, their goal weight and a few other bits of relevant information and from that it creates an easy-to-adhere-to fitness plan. When users lose weight, it automatically adjusts calorie limits and recommended weekly exercise totals. It also gives users the opportunity to connect with other people on a fitness journey so that people can motivate each other. Foods can also be logged online at www.loseit.com. With the help of this app, I was able to lose 80 pounds in the past twelve months. The bottom line is that Lose It! works. — Cost: Free.

2. My Fitness Pal – MFP is often lauded for its large food database, with over two million items. It is simple to use and can work with any sort of eating plan: low-calorie, low-carb, high protein, you name it! — Cost: Free.

3. Weight Watchers Mobile – This app stands out mainly because of its affiliation with the ever-popular Weight Watchers program, now known for its celebrity success stories, most recently Jennifer Hudson and Jessica Simpson (after her first pregnancy). Weight Watchers Mobile equips users with a variety of fitness tools including a weight tracker, an online support community, and the famous Weight Watchers points system which affords users a great deal of freedom in deciding what to eat. —Cost: Free . . . with Weight Watchers subscription. The drawback to this app is that you have to actually enroll in Weight Watchers. The payment schedule for Weight Watchers is based on an enrollment fee that includes a registration fee and a weekly meetings fee.

Workout Plans

1. Strong Lifts “5×5” – This is definitely one of the more popular workout apps available, dealing mainly with strength training. With a body composition tracker (% body fat) and a regimented program, using this app puts you well on the way to becoming tight and toned. — Cost: Free.

2. GAIN Fitness Cross Trainer – I’m admittedly biased on this one, having been captivated by the idea of cross training for the past few months. Having tried one week of GAIN’s exercise plans, I can attest to its rigor. GAIN fitness helps users build a custom fitness plan based on the experience of a network of professional trainers and athletes. It also keeps track of workouts completed and calories burned. — Cost: Free.

3. Teemo – In the words of Teemo’s developers, “This app turns fitness into a game that doesn’t require a gym, exercise equipment, or even running shoes. Invite Facebook friends to a “virtual challenge” in a specific environment, like a jungle, mountain, or desert. Participants “win” by doing expert-approved cardio, strength, and flexibility exercises, which range from easy to difficult. Teemo makes exercising a social event and gets people to incorporate movement into their daily lives”. — Cost: Free.

Meditation Apps

1. Calm – This is an app designed to reduce stress and bring a little more calm into users’ lives. It offers a seven-step program designed to give users the tools they need to become calmer, in addition to seven guided meditations sets of varying lengths. This app is great if you’re sitting in your dorm room, or on a bus/plane/train, or even if you’re doing yoga. — Cost: Free.

2. Equanimity – The aim of this app is to get the “entire world to meditate.” To that end, the app provides users with tools to time their sittings, journal post-meditation thoughts and observations, and track their meditation schedules with several useful graphs. According to its developers,  “Easy tracking tools allow users to monitor their meditation schedule and quickly notice when they’re slipping out of a routine — which makes it that much easier to get back into one. The simple design helps users maintain their Zen post-meditation. There are no wild graphics or unnecessary bells and whistles—well, except for the chimes (which users can set to go off during or at the end of a meditation session), but those are pretty cool too.” — Cost: $4.99.

Have you tried any of these? Or do you have a favorite app that didn’t make it on the list? Let us know in the comments below!