It’s a new year and the perfect time to take a look at your fitness or consider a diet to deal with those Christmas-pudding-fueled pounds. O2 has a great selection of smartphones that can help you stick with your New Year’s resolutions. Here’s our selection of the best fitness apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone 7…
Track It!, £1.19
A handy iPhone app for tracking your diet, the app also has a list of 240 different exercises and helps you keep tabs of your daily and weekly targets. If you’re into graphs and charts, the Track It! app gives you lots of graphs and data to show how well (or badly) you’re doing. A smart little gut-buster.
Run Mate, £2.39
Built for experts and amateurs alike, Run Mate will teach you how to get up to your first 5K then allow you to design your own drills and runs when you’re a bit more advanced. The app helps you put together a training schedule and set intervals for warming up and training on the flat and in the hills.
Daily Burn, £free
An incredibly fully featured iPhone app, Daily Burn lets you enter your current weight and the goal you’re aiming for. It’ll tell you how many calories you should be aiming for and graph your progress. You can even input the food you eat to get a clear idea of your calorie intake, and the app includes a barcode scanner to easily enter info. Best of all, everything syncs to dailyburn.com so you can take a look at your data wherever you are.
iFitness, £1.19
iFitness for iPhone is a seriously advanced fitness app. There’s over 230 individual exercises to choose from with a picture and description for all of them and a video for the vast majority. You can select exercises to target a specific muscle group and develop a workout to suit your needs. It’s the ideal pocket fitness companion if you don’t know your squat thrust from your burpee, and need a little visual tuition.
Combining a cardio training programme with a computer training partner, this app is a great way of turning your Android phone into a virtual workout buddy. The virtual race simulator is a proper motivator, as you feel that you’re trying to beat someone to the end of the course.
Endomondo Sports Tracker, £free
Another great free app for runners and cyclists, Endomondo uses your phone’s built-in GPS and accelerometer to track time, distance, speed and altitude and records your workouts in a handy record. There’s integration with Google Maps and you can access your music through the app so that helpful burst of Eye Of The Tiger is never too far away. Endomondo also works with a wide variety of other mobile devices, check their website to see if yours is compatible.
AllSport GPS, £6.40
One of the costlier Android apps, AllSport does a lot to earn its keep – there’s the ability to track routes, distance, time speed and calroies burned. Plus it’s packing oodles of mapped-out routes, virtual racing partners, route downloads and speed graphs. You can also share workouts online through sites including Facebook.
Beer Gut Fitness, 63p
A great combination of humour and functionality, Beer Gut Fitness might just be our favourite Android fitness app. If you’re worried about your intake of calories from beer or any other drink for that matter, this app will keep track of your consumption and tell you how you’re doing on calories vs exercise. Workout hard and it’ll let you know what beer you can have as a reward. Cheers.
Backpacker GPS trails, £6.50
One for outdoorsy types who want to keep track of their walks, Backpacker is a portable trip database combined with GPS smarts. You can track your wanderings, share pictures and videos and download new maps straight from the app.
Interestd in apps? Read Smartphone apps to get yourself organised
This one’s a great stopwatch for your Windows Phone 7 handset with a GPS tracker built-in. It collects info as you run to give you distance, speed and pace. You’ll see you route plotted on a map alongside graphs tied to your speed. Your workouts are recorded in a calendar and the app talks to you to keep you motivated.
SmartRunner, £free
Like G-Sports, SmartRunner grabs all your speed, distance, calories burned and the like from your Windows Phone 7 device, but it fires it off to an account at smartrunner.com so you can take a look at your data wherever you are. And, if you’re feeling brave, share your progress on Twitter and Facebook.
Stopwatch Sport, £0.79
If you just want a simple app to time your runs, Stopwatch Sport is the Windows Phone 7 app for you. It features a selection of timers – lap timer, countdown or standard stopwatch.
StepCounter, £0.79
For keeping track of all that exercise you do by accident as you go about your day, Step Counter is great. It keeps tabs on your steps as you strut around the place, and also includes a stopwatch. You can set a goal for the day and then see how many steps you’ve wracked up.
DeekFit Gym, £varies
DeekFit Gym is one of the most sophisticated fitness apps for Windows Phone 7. It allows you to enter and track a variety of workouts, view exercise stats, build routines, set countdown timers, monitor your weight, set goals, keep notes, add custom exercises and calculate your BMI etc. In fact, just saying that list of features has left us out of breath and burned 30 calories.
While the developer name is a little laughable (Fat Secret? Really?!), the Calorie Counter is a handy app for your Blackberry. It has a database of calorie and nutritional information for common foods and makes it simple for you to keep track of what you’re eating and stick to that New Year’s diet. It’ll also sync to an online account so you can look at your data online rather than just peering at your Blackberry.
RoadRunner GPS, £3.20
This is a great Blackberry map for collecting fitness stats. It taps into Blackberry Maps and will link up with your Facebook and Twitter accounts if you choose to. There’s an online account to sync all your workout data to, so you won’t lose it when you decide to upgrade your phone.
iFitness, £1.19
Another full-on fitness app, iFitness gives you instructions for common exercises, allows you set targets for your exercise programme and offers both an activity diary and a goal-based exercise plan. There’s also a nifty selection of equipment-free exercises which is handy if you’re often in hotel rooms on business but want to stick to your New Year’s resolutions.
HandyLogs Fitness, £free
Another great free Blackberry fitness app, this keeps track of your activities and the calories burned. It’ll show you how much weight you’ve lost and track the changes to your body. There’s also an online account so syncing your info there means it’s not tied to your Blackberry.
Morsel, £free
After a few Blackberry apps with terrible names, kudos to Morsel for having an excellent name to go with its cool features. It suggests simple daily tasks to help you keep fit and helps you achieve goals with a customisable programme. Tasty.
Sports Tracker £free Sports Tracker Sports Tracker is a GPS-enabled activity tracker that runs on Nokia S60 smartphones and tracks your speed, distance and time. It automatically stores the information on your Nokia device using either a Bluetooh GPS device or a phone with integrated GPS. The Sports Tracker app makes it very simple to keep track of your programme and how you’re doing.
Wellness Diary £free Softonic Wellness Diary is a free Symbian fitness app which makes it easy to keep a record of your exercise routine and how it is effecting the state of your body and general health. It keeps track of your weight, the activities you’re undertaking in your programme and what changes your exercise routine is making possible.
HeiaHeia £free HeiaHeia A free activity and fitness tracker, HeiaHeia is a Finnish app but written in English and includes support for 300 different sports and activities with features to share your fitness plans for friends. The HeiaHeia Symbian fitness app combines with the website to help you keep track of your exercise regime and build and share a programme that suits you.
Voice Coach £free All About Symbian Voice Coach is a free Symbian fitness app that gives you a very vocal coach who will tell you how long you’ve been doing an activity, how that compares to your personal best and where you are in a race with virtual opponents. It’s a really handy training tool for preparing for compeitions or simply making yourself try harder.
SitSatSat £free All About Symbian One of the biggest problems in modern life is sitting at your desk or on the sofa for too long rather than getting up and moving. SitSatSat is a timer Symbian fitness app which buzzes when you have been sitting for over a predetermined amount of time and indicates that it is time for you to do some exercise or at least get away from your desk.
Image by sovett