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Technologies have intertwined with all spheres of our life. Today, the way we do things greatly differs from our parents’ approaches. In our digital era, for every activity you can possibly think of, there is already a technology that simplifies it.
This influences our lives both positively and negatively. While our everyday routine becomes easier, people tend to get lazy and move less. This sedentary lifestyle is one of the main reasons for various health problems, including cardiovascular diseases1, diabetes, obesity, and osteoporosis2.
Fortunately, there is the other side of the coin. Thanks to fitness apps developers, we have products that help us improve our well-being and even remind us to warm up or have a walk.
Modern gadgets can collect our personal data and various health metrics. They give us recommendations, control our parameters, schedule training, prescript treatments, and so on.
Are you still doubting whether such an app can impact your fitness and lifestyle? Read on to find out more insights!
How Use of Fitness Apps Improves Sport Habits?
Fitness apps change the life of their users and boost physical activity. Various studies came to the conclusion that active app users can change their habits and lifestyles. Indeed, by constant monitoring of their fitness progress and doing sports, they can adjust the type and length of training sessions to their energy level and mood.
Users with mobile apps/fitness programs installed on their smartphones increase their level of physical activity during the day. This, in turn, helps reduce the risk of chronic conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, and certain types of cancer3.
Moreover, users can keep up their motivation by competing with each other and getting in-app rewards. With mobile fitness apps, they don’t have to leave their houses and commute to the gym — there are sets of home exercises, which is especially useful for stay-at-home moms and remote workers.
Below we’ll investigate the impact of fitness applications on the formation of our fitness habits in more detail!
Influence Users’ Sports Habits
Apps like Strava, MyFitnessPal, Nike+, or RunKeeper can be useful habit-forming tools. They help you stick to your training regimen and turn your workout into a game with a competitive element. The concept of gamification comes into play: by rewarding users with trophies or badges for achieving certain health-related goals, they are motivated to get better results.
The goals to be achieved are as follows:
- diet control
- number of steps
- training duration
- calories burnt
- records
- and more
For example, Strava provides notifications and personalized recommendations. This way, forming habits becomes easier.
Provide Personalized Services
In some way, fitness apps can replace your coach and nutritionist4. By specifying every detail of your training, the app can come up with personalized recommendations on how to lift more, work out for longer, build muscle mass, torch fat, etc.
The same goes for nutrition. Apart from a premade eating schedule, you can leverage calorie calculators and diet advice.
The more info you provide, the more detailed and accurate recommendations you get. All this leads to an increase in users’ satisfaction and loyalty as the result becomes noticeable.
Increase the Engagement of Users in Sports
Fitness apps are all-in-one. While reaching the desired shape, you maintain healthy competition with other users. In doing so, you are 2X motivated to start another training, avoid high-calorie snacks, and perform no less than 10k steps a day.
Moreover, you aren’t alone while doing push-ups at home. Your fitness app keeps track of everything you do and interacts with you.
The above perks keep you engaged and assist you in mastering your favorite type of sport.
Set Realistic & Achievable Goals
As a beginner, it can be quite hard to choose a training program and stick to it. That’s where mobile fitness apps step in.
Offering a well-thought-out training program, the application lets you start with basics, gradually moving on to the next stages, setting and achieving realistic goals. Thanks to this feature, you won’t harm yourself with complicated exercises and heavy weights. You’ll learn new movements as well as raise working weights step-by-step.
Talking about exercises, the app will also show you videos on how to perform every movement. Thus, you should encounter no problems sticking to the regimen while eliminating harmful impacts and achieving fantastic goals.
Make Fitness Affordable for Every User
Many argue that fitness is a hardly affordable activity since the gym membership and the services of a personal trainer/nutritionist are costly. Also, another popular excuse is that the gym is located too far from the house, or there is no time to do exercise.
Luckily, the use of mobile fitness apps eliminates all these issues. Depending on provided functionality, you can choose between the two plans: free or chargeable. On top of that, a chance to get a home workout program makes fitness affordable for residents of small towns.
No need to wait until your instructor goes online — interact with your virtual trainer 24/7.
How to Choose the Right Fitness App and Don’t Cause Harm to Your Health
Such technology is only evolving, and it can’t be said for sure that any app from the Play/App Store will make Arnold out of you in a month. All the recommendations given by your online trainer should be applied wisely.
In case it is health- or diet-related advice, you should better consult with your doctor. Also, be careful following a fitness program since many apps don’t adjust exercises to your particular case. The majority of free apps are just copying one set of movements for every user. Thus, youngsters can harm themselves by performing exercises aimed at adults.
When choosing an app to download, check reviews, ask friends, and look through suggested applications for your specific goal.
What We Can Expect from Fitness Apps in the Future
Modern technologies allow apps to count calories, measure speed/distance, track time, fat/muscle weight in a body, etc. Soon, with AI5 and ML adoption6, the range of services will only increase. Hopefully, in a few years, any person will have a chance to work out and get in shape from wherever they are.
- Bansal, Manish. “Cardiovascular disease and COVID-19.” Diabetes & Metabolic Syndrome: Clinical Research & Reviews 14.3 (2020): 247-250. ↩︎
- Clynes, Michael A., et al. “The epidemiology of osteoporosis.” British medical bulletin 133.1 (2020): 105-117. ↩︎
- Hanahan, Douglas. “Hallmarks of cancer: new dimensions.” Cancer discovery 12.1 (2022): 31-46. ↩︎
- Barrea, Luigi, et al. “Mediterranean diet as medical prescription in menopausal women with obesity: a practical guide for nutritionists.” Critical reviews in food science and nutrition 61.7 (2021): 1201-1211. ↩︎
- Vaishya, Raju, et al. “Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications for COVID-19 pandemic.” Diabetes & Metabolic Syndrome: Clinical Research & Reviews 14.4 (2020): 337-339. ↩︎
- Maroufkhani, Parisa, et al. “Big data analytics adoption: Determinants and performances among small to medium-sized enterprises.” International journal of information management 54 (2020): 102190. ↩︎
Last Updated on by Sathi Chakraborty, MSc Biology
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