By Matthew Lee
So you've probably been using your phone a lot more lately, especially now that you're working from home. However, are you using it in that most productive way that you possibly can? Well, in this post, I'll be sharing my top 5 health and fitness apps that are literally the best fitness apps that you can have, especially if you're working from home.
Nike Training Club
The first app is the Nike training at this app is made by Nike, and I love this app. One of the specific reasons why is because of the fact that you can basically customize your workout. Not only can you choose what muscle group either is upper body, lower body, core, but whatever it is that you want to focus on. You could choose it. You can also base it off of your time availability. So if you think about it, you only have 20 minutes in between like a meeting.
You want to get something in. You can actually do that and choose 20 minutes. And then lastly, it goes by the amount of equipment that you have so you can either do body weight and no equipment lightweight, or you have a full fledged gym.
The second thing I love is that you actually have a person showing you how to do the exercise. It's not live, but it's a real person who's showing a correct form. And it's really, really cool that they do that throughout the whole entire workout.
And the last thing I love is actually the premium feature. I don't use it. I've done the trial before, but it's basically a six, eight-week program that you can choose, whether it's like using improving your flexibility, your strength, getting a little bit more toned. You can do a six to eight-week program that's very customized based on what you have available to you.
MyFitnessPal by Under Armour
My second favorite app is MyFitnessPal by Under Armour. MyFitnessPal is extremely helpful to understand what's your intake looks like. Now that I've been tracking my food since working from home, I've actually noticed that my diet has totally changed and totally shifted from when I was working. I basically was just eating whatever was on hand. And I wasn't really thinking about nutrition. I was just thinking about excess. Tracking that through MyFitnessPal, I was able to see what I was doing wrong and how I could turn it around.
And then another great feature of my fitness powers. They have a huge library of different foods and it's the search function. You could scan bar codes at a grocery store if you're going to basically find whatever it is that you need to find at MyFitnessPal.
Sworkit
My third favorite app is called Sworkit. It is an abs specific workout app. And wow, it's really, really good. If you think about it, if you're sitting at a desk all day, especially working from home, you're can put a lot of strain on your lower back. And the best way to support that is to have a really strong core.
And this app, they separate the workouts between abs-specific. They also have something that's more core focus, which is something I actually recommend to a lot of you. And then finally, you also have the absolute apps, which basically covers both, which is doing core as well as apps. And that's the one that I typically do the most.
You can basically set it to a specific time that you want to. So whether it's like five minutes or eight minutes or ten minutes, what I like to do is I started from like four minutes and then each week I'd progressive by about 30 seconds to a minute. But it's just super cool how you could do that and you can actually see how you're progressing.
SleepWatch & AutoSleep
My fourth favorite fitness app and the one that I think is very severely underrated is my auto-sleep or sleep watch app.
It's super important to understand how you are sleeping each night because that leads to the amount of energy you have the next day, as well as how productive you are the next day. So one of the main things I love about this app is the fact that you can actually see the different levels of sleep, whether you're in deep sleep, light sleep. If you had interrupted sleep, were you restless? It goes to all of those you could see based on the different timeframes, what level you were at.
And this is super helpful to understand if you're getting really good quality sleep. Another feature that I really love is the fact that it will alert you when you should start getting ready for bed. So something I've been starting to do is actually keeping my phone away from me at my desk and turning off all the lights, turning off any tap blue lights and reading before I go to bed. And what that does is it helps my body just relax and get ready to go to sleep.
And I think that's a super, super useful, especially we think about apps nowadays. We need apps that give us that next step. It's great to understand how much weight we're lifting. It's great to understand, like where we stand, how much sleep we're getting. But really that next level inside is what we need. It's basically having a health coach in your pocket.
Question of the Day: What is your favorite health and fitness app that you have on your phone? Let me know in the comments.
