Apps to help you maintain your fitness routine: Talking Tech podcast – USA TODAY
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Brett Molina:
Hey there listeners. It’s Brett Molina. Welcome back to Talking Tech. It’s the holiday season. So between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we’re obviously all enjoying a lot of food. Whether it’s Thanksgiving turkey, all the trimmings, Christmas cookies, Christmas whatever. We’re obviously eating a lot over these last several weeks in the midst of the holiday season. Now, for some of us, you’re probably wanting to maintain a fitness routine or stay healthy at least a little bit while you enjoy the holidays. This is where tech comes in. My colleague, Jennifer Jolly writes about this in a column that you can read on tech.usatoday.com. It’s called Use This Tech to Stick to your Fitness Routine over the Holidays No Matter How You Exercise. I’ll line up a couple of apps that she talks about, plus one that I recommend that I’ve used quite a bit and I really enjoy, but let’s start here.
So one of the first apps she mentions is called FitOn, and it’s one that she says she uses the most anytime she wants to exercise. It has a ton of workouts, no matter what you’re looking for, strength training, yoga, dance. It even has stuff like stretches that can help you relax before you go to bed. It also has a lot of other information, too. You can get nutrition advice. You can track your progress. You can also share progress with friends if you decide to. It’s optional. There’s a free version that you can get, but there’s also a pro plan. That’s at 19.99 a month or 119.99 a year, and that gives you custom music. You can connect to health monitoring devices. You can download things for offline and a lot of other stuff. So obviously one really great fitness app.
The other one she mentions is called FlexIt. This is really cool. It connects you directly with a personal trainer, so you can get a live virtual, personal training session through a video call. So if say, you’re having questions about your form when you’re trying to do an exercise, the trainer can look at it by taking a screen grab. They can mark it up and they can help you figure out, “Okay, this is what you need to do to ensure that you’re doing the exercise properly.” So really cool. And Jennifer outlines a ton more apps, and you can read about that more in her column. The one app that I’ll recommend and I’ve used it quite a bit is called MyFitnessPal. It is very focused on nutrition. It’s a really great app to use if you’re tracking calories and wanting to, again, indulge in the holidays, but you don’t want to go too overboard.
The way it works is you can take the food you eat and you just log it every day. And so really simple to use. They have a ton of items you can search to pinpoint exactly what you ate and how much. It even has some fast food stuff there too. If say you get a meal at Chipotle, for example, you can log that as part of it. It’s got a lot of detail, a lot of information you can really drill down and get precise. It’ll start off with you plugging in info, like your height and weight and your activity and things like that. And then it’ll tell you, okay, you can eat this many calories to lose weight or maintain your weight or whatever it is. And then you go from there.
But again, it’s super useful. It’s probably one of my favorite health fitness apps that I’ve ever used. I really enjoy it. If you haven’t used it yet and you’re looking for something to help get you back into shape, or try to eat a little bit better. Definitely download that. Again, called MyFitnessPal. And once again, you can read more of Jennifer’s recommendations in her column on tech.usatoday.com. Listeners, let’s hear from you. Do you have any comments, questions, or show ideas? Any tech problems you want us to try to address? You can find me on Twitter @brettmolina23. Please don’t forget to subscribe and rate us or leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, anywhere you get your podcasts. You’ve been listening to Talking Tech. We’ll be back tomorrow with another quick hit from the world of tech.
