Fitness App Review

Fitness App: MyFitnessPal

MyFitnessPal is an app for your smartphone that helps you track your diet and exercise by calculating all your nutrients, calories, and vitamins for you. One of the strengths the app is that it is free but you can upgrade your app for $9.99 a month or $49.99 a month. The upgrade removes the ads from the app so it is not very necessary. The user can still have all the benefits of the app without upgrading. The app is very easy to navigate and user friendly. There is a scanning option that when the user scans a food or beverage, the app automatically recognizes the item and adds the information for you. Another strength is that there is a pie chart with your daily fat, carbohydrate, and protein intake that is easy to follow and can help you easily see what you are missing from your diet.  One weakness of the app is that is only takes into consideration cardiovascular exercise and not any type of weight training. Based on only your cardiovascular exercise, the app will add extra calories to your day. As mentioned earlier, the app does have a scanning feature. The downside of the scanning feature is that it does not take into account food made from scratch. This is trouble some because the user has to put in each ingredient and the amount individually which can be time consuming and cumbersome. I think a way to improve the app is maybe have a saved recipe category. Say you make your grandma’s famous home made spaghetti once a week. Instead of every week having to individually put in all the ingredients, there should be a save option to reuse the recipe next week. This will cut down on time and over time, you will have a library of pre-saved recipes ready to input. I think this app is good for long-term health behavior. It can help an individual stay on track with their diet and help them understand the nutrients they are missing.

Fitness App: Fitbod

Fitbod is an app for your smartphone that creates personalize workout routines by analyzing the users’ tracked workout data. The major strength of this app is that it is extremely customizable. You can add in what equipment you have, weight, height, muscles you want to target, rest days, and more. Because of this I find that anyone can use this app. The major downside of the app is that it does not have a preview of the workouts for you. The app only tells you what to do but does not show you how to do them. This can be difficult for individuals just beginning to workout or even experts trying new workouts. Therefore, a way to improve this app would be to add videos of trainers doing the exercises with instructions on how to do them. In conclusion, I believe this app is beneficial for long-term health. Because of its customizability, as you gain weight, grow older, or gain more gym experience, you can change your workouts to account for these changes.