Top Rated iPod and iPhone Fitness & Nutrition Apps – What Do YOU Think?

This article recently appeared at BenGreenfieldFitness.com, but I wanted to give you a chance to look at it too, since many of these applications are very good for fitness professionals who need better client management.

In this article, I’m going to give you insight into some of the more popular iPod and iPhone nutrition and fitness apps that are currently available on the market. After you read this post, I’d like to hear what YOU think…

…specifically what would YOU want to see in the “perfect” iPhone or iPod nutrition or fitness app? Have you used any of these? In your opinion what is missing from these apps? Do you want me to make an app that fits your needs? Let’s talk about it…leave your comments below!

“Tap And Track”:

This is a Paid Calorie Tracker that allows you to create your own recipes/meals, without actually needing an internet connection, since the entire food database is offline. It works on iPod Touch and iPhone. It’s “selling” features are:

• A large and accurate database, verified by “nutrition experts” (not quite sure what that means, but there you have it)
• Ability to build your own recipes and custom foods
• Speed, no crashing, stability in the actual app
• Ability to use offline, so you can track your food when you don’t have a connection
• Full graphing capability
• Frequent updates to the food database
• Ability to export nutrition data as a “CSV” file that can be opened with a Spreadsheet in something like Excel
• Good customer support

What do you think…would you use it? Leave your comment below, and click here to see the Tap And Track website.

————————————————

“RunKeeper”:

RunKeeper uses the GPS technology in your iPhone 3G/3GS to track your fitness activity, giving you comparable results to an expensive GPS watch (although I’d like to see some accuracy comparisons to see whether it’s as accurate as a Garmin). You can also enter your activities manually, including your treadmill runs too.

The interface of the app allows you to track how far you went, how long it took, what your pace/speed was, how many calories you burned, and the path you traveled on a map. Once your activity is completed, the data is synced to the RunKeeper website, where you can view a history of all of your activities, and cumulative totals of all of your vital stats. You can also share your progress with friends by posting your activities to Facebook and Twitter, and creating a profile page that allows people to view all of your public activities (interestingly, all my clients can do this already with the the TrainingPeaks software that I use to coach and train them…hmm…)

RunKeeper is only compatible with the iPhone 3G/3GS , but here are the features:

• Maps integration: See the exact path you traveled on a map, both on the device and on the website
• Music: You can listen to the iPod during your activity, and change tracks without leaving the RunKeeper application
• Audio Cues: Get time or distance-based updates through your headphones during your activity
• Interval Workouts: Create a workout built from intervals of time and/or distance, and let the audio cues coach you along
• Splits: You can see your split times in the app as you do your activities

What do you think…would you use it? Leave your comment below, and click here to see the RunKeeper website.

————————————————

“MyPersonalDiet”

This is a fairly feature-rich and comprehensive diet application. MyPersonalDiet gives you tools to reach your weight goal by providing methods of to track your food and workouts, monitor your health and get clear assessments of your efforts and get results via a variety of charts. Key features include:

• Live GPS recording for your outdoor cardio workouts. See your current coordinates, heading, duration, distance, average speed, current speed, current altitude, battery life and route on Google Maps.
• The Today view shows how many calories you can consume for the remaining of the day while staying within your diet goals, and makes it easy to enter new meals, workouts or health data.
• The Journal shows multiple daily charts for any given day, such as energy consumption, weight, nutrients, and lets you review all the data you enter on that day.
• The Calendar provides snapshots of your weight and data entry for a month, making it easy to track your weight, and to find days you entered data.
• See various charts about your meals, workouts and health data, over any period of time: calories, calories (net), meal schedule, points, body weight, body fat, Carbs-Prot-Fat %, nutrients (e.g. carbs, protein, sodium, calcium, etc), blood pressure, blood markers (cholesterol, glucose, etc), workout duration, workout distance, average heart rate, body measurements.
• Set realistic goals, enter your own diet plan or choose among low carbs, high protein, low fat, etc., set lower and upper limits on any nutrients you want to track (e.g. maximum of 300g of carbs per day), even enter your target meal schedule and see how well you are following it.
• The food database is based on the latest US Dept of Agriculture food database, and we added hundreds of popular food restaurants (with more to come), for a total of almost 10,000 food items.
• Track your workouts. Select one of the 32 pre-defined activities or create your own, then enter the duration and MyPersonalDiet calculates the energy you burnt. You can also enter the distance, average heart rate and more.
• Enter health data: weight, body fat, heart rate (resting), mood, blood pressure, activity level, blood markers, body measurements, custom fields and a note.

What do you think…would you use it? Leave your comment below, and click here to see the MyPersonalDiet website.

————————————————

“iFitness”:

This one was raved about by The New York Times, Washington Post, ABC News and claims to be the #1 selling fitness app worldwide. iFitness provides images, videos & instructions of people performing over 260 exercises, sorted by body region or the exact muscle it targets. Simply choose a target, tap on an exercise, and you are presented with a picture of the exercise. Double tap to flip the image and reveal clearly worded instructions on the back – directing you step-by-step. For more difficult exercises, a single tap on the video icon brings up video instruction.