5 Ways Fitness Apps are Helping Us Improve Our Overall Health

Data analytics is revolutionary. It has been of immense help in sectors like healthcare. Here patients are involved in diagnosis, recovery and treatment procedures. It is done by giving them adequate information about what is happening in their body. This also covers information on medications, recovery phases and more. Refining this further, fitness apps are taking it a notch higher with the opportunities. They offer opportunities to their users with respect to taking ownership of their bodies, fitness and general health (physical and mental). 

Today, a consumer or a user is not a passive recipient of facts or information about their health but owners of their actions. Through instant reports, charts and insights, the consumer of today precisely knows what diet regime they should follow. They can know fitness programs they should opt for. It is possible to know about mindfulness techniques they should implement and what not. 

The best part is that all their efforts are instantly available to them as insights. These are available through graphs and visuals. So they feel good about their commitments,. They can know when to step up their involvement levels. They can also simply understand when they are overdoing things.

In short, fitness app development are revolutionizing the way people view their role in maintaining good health. They are making the way for new neurons to emerge. Also they are helping in the formation of habits and ultimately discipline. Fitness apps are breaking several myths and misconceptions today. With so many benefits, we felt it was important to address the major benefits of using fitness apps and trackers today. 

So, for those of you wondering if wellness and fitness apps work, here’s an exhaustive list of reasons why they do. 

5 Ways Fitness Apps Are Impacting Our Habits

1. Moderate Sleep Cycle

One of the major disconnects between our fitness goals and results was the unavailability of solid insights. We weren’t able to put a number on our efforts. We were not able to visualize them in a tangible way for the human mind to process. That’s why we either gave up soon or did not bother to start our fitness journey at all. 

However, with the onset of wellness app development, we can have hard facts about our lifestyle and efforts. It allow us to take corrective measures whenever we go off track. 

Thanks to fitness apps today, we are now able to moderate better our sleep cycle. We can understand the reasons behind our grumpiness, sluggish behavior the next day. We can also major our productivity at work. All the emotions of restlessness or dullness can now be done away with through fitness apps. These provide adequate trackers such as sleep cycle trackers. These also provide reminders to get us to sleep. Apps give insights on our REM cycle the next day. 

Apps of today also offer tools to put us to sleep like calming music, ambient sounds, affirmations and more. Apps are connected to our smartwatches or other wearable devices. We can now take charge of when we sleep, how much we sleep and the consequences of our actions. 

2. Meditation And Mental Health

These are stressful times. Lot of people are having it tough at work, home or both. People are finding it increasingly difficult to pave the way for peace of mind even for a few minutes every day. Besides, tons of people juggle multiple jobs for additional income. On a daily basis, we as humans go through more stress than feelings of contentment or happiness. 

When a range of negative emotions take over our mind, it becomes increasingly difficult to focus on work. It is hard to stay productive and sane and ensure mental wellbeing. Moreover, the pandemic put most of us through testing conditions that made our mental health go for a toss. 

However, wellness apps in the market today are making sure we take care of our mental health as much as we do our physical health by providing us the resources, guides and tools to meditate, journal, take up affirmations and do whatever it takes to bring in peace of mind. 

There are apps to calm our stress and anxiety levels, improve sleep patterns, stop overthinking, deal with trauma, reach out for therapy and more. Apps like Headspace and Calm are taking mental health seriously and are turning a topic that is almost a taboo in our society into mainstream conversations. 

3. Diet And Nutrition

In our busy schedule, what we take for granted is our physical health. Footballed between meetings, we skip, undereat or overeat our meals, ultimately suffering from consequences like obesity, acid reflux, gastrointestinal diseases and more. However, the diet and fitness apps out there are arriving as a promising relief by empowering us with the right tools and trackers to put our physical wellbeing on priority. 

The apps offer diet charts, consultations with nutritionists and experts, calorie trackers, ingredient trackers, allergy trackers and more to ensure we are mindful of what we eat and assimilate with every meal. There are personalized goals initiated and maintained by these apps that make every journey unique. Meaning, my dietary goals will be different from what you would be recommended. 

We can retrieve reports, share them with our doctors, understand our shortcomings, get an estimate of our weight if we continue a particular diet or caloric intake value and do more with the data we generate and feed. 

4. Gamification

Gamification is probably the best thing to have happened in this phase of tech evolution. With gamification, users are rewarded with points, scores, badges, achievement unlocks or any other incentive that will excite them to keep doing what they are doing. As far as fitness and health are concerned, motivation is key and gamification ensures this factor is consistently at optimum levels through small games and reward-based task systems. 

For instance, fitness apps could include a pizza or dessert in a weekly meal plan if a user hit a particular fitness goal like burning specific amounts of calories in a week. When users have something to look forward to, they are more likely to sustain in an activity. 

5. Leaderboards And Accountability

Speaking of motivation, another factor that keeps us motivated is accountability. When we know there are people watching, we would continue to do our tasks. Fitness apps today have features to hold us accountable by involving people in our circle. 

We could include contacts in our fitness apps and they would receive updates on our performance every week. They would receive charts and visuals on a range of metrics we give permissions to. 

For instance, when we add our family doctor to the app, they would receive insights on our sleep patterns, diet, food intake, meal plans, stress and anxiety levels and more.

Another interesting way that fitness apps use to keep us hooked in our fitness journey is through leaderboards. With referral programs, we can bring in people from our circles to the app and collectively get on a fitness journey. 

So, based on the performance of every member in the circle, a leaderboard will be created and updated each week that shows who has performed the best and who needs to work a lot more. 

This is an extension of the gamification concept, where a sense of competition is instilled among users to keep them motivated. All these are possible only through fitness apps and wearable devices today.

Wrapping Up

So, all those hesitant souls out there, we believe you are now convinced of the wonders you could do with fitness and wellness apps that sound rather simple from the outlook. And for those of you who intend to develop a fitness app, keep the points we discussed in mind and empower your users with the information they need to retain them and offer them ultimate app experiences.

As your users keep coming back to your app, they are developing a solid habit with your app as the central driving force. How beautiful is that!