Today, many people get into fitness to strengthen their health and build an athletic body. However, it’s hard for newcomers to focus on sports activities when they can’t see instant results. Over time, sports enthusiasts give up on fitness, thinking that it’s not going to work for them. Unfortunately, they just don’t know how to track their results properly.
Modern technologies offer a solution to this problem. Fitness apps allow users to analyze their progress daily and stay motivated. Recent researches state the fitness app market share will reach $13 billion by 2025. This means that more and more people entrust their fitness progress to mobile apps. In this article, we’ll go through the main fitness app types and discuss how to create a fitness app.
Fitness App Types
When it comes to fitness, a single app can’t be a one-stop-shop for all fitness activities due to their diversity. That’s why there are several app types available in app stores. Let’s take a closer look at each of them.
Fitness Coach
A well-balanced workout plan and the right exercise technique are the major steps to progress in fitness. Personal coaches can handle all these issues, but they may be too expensive for people that decided to try sports. Plus, sometimes people exercise outside the gym where they can’t get in touch with their coach.
Smart fitness coach apps become a solution to this problem. These apps draw up personalized workout plans based on users’ preferences and physical characteristics. The app scales physical load based on the progress.
Apps like Nike training Club and Fitbit Coach are the most prominent examples of this app type. They contain a lot of workout sets that can fit all users. Professional coaches explain how to perform each exercise right inside the app.
Workout Logging
These apps help users to keep a record of their workouts. Unlike fitness coach apps, they don’t have personalized workout plans. Without logging, apps track the number of burned calories, display groups of muscles involved during the training session, and more. With synchronized smart devices, these apps gather even more data.
Apps like Samsung Health and Huawei Health help users track their daily physical activities. With geolocation features, they can count the walking and running distance traveled by the user and estimate the number of calories burned.
Diet and Nutrition
A balanced diet is the core of a healthy body. All exercises have no point if you don’t maintain a diet. Diet apps help users to keep track of their calorie intake and nutritional value. Users log all the food they’ve consumed during the day, and the app notifies users if they experience a lack or surplus of calories.
MyFitnessPal and Lifesum are the most popular diet apps in their niche. They have large food databases and convenient interfaces. Besides, they can sync with third-party apps to adjust the diet based on the user’s physical activities.
Activity Tracking
The final app type that tracks users’ daily activity. The simplest version of this app is just a step tracker. More complicated ones can also track running and cycling routes. The app can remember the route for further analysis and reuse in future training sessions.
Runtastic is a great example of an activity tracking app. It displays previously saved running routes, provides various challenges, and adds a bit of competitiveness for users with its leaderboards.
Main Features for a Workout App
Features are the main components of every fitness app. When building an app, companies try to launch the product as fast as possible. That’s why they often come up with an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that includes only the basic functionalities. Here’s the list of the essential functionalities of the fitness app.
- Registration. Registration lets users create their own accounts to set up workout preferences and specify their physical characteristics.
- Workout menu. Workout menus contain different sets of exercises and videos that explain the correct technique of each particular exercise.
- Statistics. Here, users track their progress for a chosen period of time. They can see the weight loss, heart rate during the workout, running speed, etc.
- Third-party apps. It’s crucial for a workout app to synchronize with other health software. For example, your step-tracking app will share the data with a third-party nutrition app and calculate the total amount of calories you’ve consumed (including burned ones).
- Wearable device. As well as third-party apps, wearable devices also broaden the abilities of the workout app. They provide new information like stress level, sleep cycles, heart rate, and more.
- Fitness database. The app’s database should have a large choice of exercises to fulfill the needs of all users.
Advanced Features for a Workout App
After the idea testing, companies create more advanced features to exceed their competitors and attract new users. Here’s the list of features that will help to make your workout app unique.
- Streaming. Users may want to watch a video to understand the exercise technique. You can either add a live streaming feature to let them watch live streams where coaches run a broadcast at a specific time or allow to record the video beforehand and let users watch it whenever it’s convenient for them.
- Personal coach. To make the app even more personalized, companies provide personal coaches for an additional fee. Users can schedule a workout session with a coach and exercise together.
- Barcode scanner. Nutrition apps can use the phone’s camera to scan the product’s barcode. After the scan, the app automatically adds the product to the list of consumed food and estimates its nutritional value.
These are only a few features that can be added to a workout app. The list can be extended further. However, advanced features are far more complicated than basic ones and require much more development time to create.
Wrapping Up
To sum up, fitness apps are very helpful for fitness enthusiasts and people who are leading a healthy lifestyle. They can also be beneficial for companies. Due to the popularity of fitness apps, it can become a great revenue source. However, to create an outstanding fitness app, you have to find a reliable software development company.
