Tag: Exercise apps

4 best apps for hiking

Ready to hit the trail? Add these great apps to your phone first!

Jump!

Although gyms are nice, nothing beats the fresh air and adventure of going on a hike. 

We may not go hiking too often because we say it’s difficult to find trails. The more reasonable explanation could be general laziness. But you know what makes it easier to be a lazy hiker?

Not knowing how to find trails!

Luckily, there are apps to help you find the best trails so you can get back out and enjoy nature!

Best apps for hiking

AllTrails

AllTrails sounds like Odin’s title “AllFather,” likely because it’s a god amongst hiking apps. (Boom, Avengers reference in a hiking app article. Nowhere is safe from the MCU!)

But seriously, this app has the best aspects of a professionally developed system. It looks good, it’s easy to use, and it compiles a large number of tools without feeling cluttered or unintuitive.

When you open the app, sign-in isn’t required immediately. AllTrails lives up to its ratings by taking you first to the hikes, based off either your current location or whatever search parameters are entered.

Locations

You can check out the ratings, discover the location, and, if you’re logged in, “favorite” a trail for later visits.

Along the bottom of the app, you can see more menu locations:

  • Plan: Once AllTrails helps you discover a new place to visit nature, they immediately give you help in setting up a trip, and a route along the trail. They list a number of aspects, the length, and whether it’s a loop, along with more information that may be useful.

Info

  • Record: This function will come up time and time again! Not only are recordings a great way to track your progress and see where you’ve been, but they’re also excellent tools for professional and hobbyist “trail runners.” Those are people that compete to set record times for a given hike, for you newbies.

Record

  • History and Profile: Here, you can watch your old recordings, track your stats, check out your past reviews, look at followers, and change settings. It’s pretty much what you’d expect.
AllTrails Download now ►
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Gaia GPS

GaiaGPS

Gaia GPS also helps users find trails, with a few extra things that set it apart from other apps.

First off, staying true to their Global Positioning System roots, Gaia immediately shows exactly where you are on a world map. It shows your current elevation, speed, direction, and more.

Gaia1So, if you were looking for trails to hike nearby, head to the center menu button, “Discover.” Here, you can find all the information you’re looking for and save the best hikes.

Gaia 2Finally, we’ll also mention the “Trip” function, which allows you to record your journey. This feature also gives you the ability to check elevation, speed, the time of sunrise and sunset, and more.

Gaia3

Pretty cool, right? We didn’t even realize Mesa, Arizona’s elevation was around 1,319 ft. You learn something new every day!

Gaia GPS Download now ►
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Strava

Strava

While AllTrails and Gaia GPS focus on bringing you the best trails, Strava represents the first of our “health and wellness” hiking apps. They specifically focus on ensuring a healthy workout and provide an environment for relationships with other hikers.

So, what does this app have that’s noteworthy? First and most importantly, the main page is a “Feed,” which will reveal information from your friends and followers, along with your own updates. At this time, we don’t have any connections, so ours looked a little bare:

Strava2

The “Explore” menu on their page has a huge list of challenges! If you’re interested in competing or simply want to join a fun competition, go here and see what’s new.

Strava1

Finally, we feel the need to mention that Strava has impressive health-tracking tools, but many of them require the “Training Pack,” part of their subscription. Keep that in mind.

Strava Download now ►
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MapMyHike

MMH

And now, Map My Hike by Under Armour!

This app has the plainest and simple user-interface. Like Strava, it begins with a feed page. However, you aren’t limited to friends or your own posts, which means you can enjoy voyages anyone has taken!

MMH1Aside from the social aspect, MMH’s main focus lies in their tracking app. In the beginning, you’ll see something like the picture below. There are pretty intrusive ads, but those can be removed with a subscription.

MMH2Once you’ve recorded your first adventure, you can head over to the tracking page. Once again, we appreciate that Map My Hike allows you a bit more freedom here; there are good metrics available without a subscription.

MMH3

Ah, good old zero-mile workouts.

We would recommend Map My Hike in conjunction with one of the better trail discovery apps. However, there is a way to find hikes. Visit the “Settings” menu, and scroll down to “Routes.” Here, you can find user-created paths that may or may not follow an actual trail!

MMH4?!Still, these are definitely more like routes than trails. Does this make Map My Hike more of a path app than a trail app? Maybe. But if it does, we don’t mind too much. If you live in the city and don’t have time to get out in nature, there may be some excellent urban trails found here!

Map My Hike Download now ►
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The journey of 1,000 miles…

We hope you enjoyed reading about these apps. Whether you’re outside more than inside or are currently one of our fellow couch potatoes looking to leave the house more often, these apps create a welcome sense of adventure along with the spirit of ease and sensibility.

Have a good time with it!

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Do fitness trackers really work?

Evidence shows that for some individuals, exercising peripherals can help shed extra weight.

Checking FitbitBetween  fitness apps and the Fitbits, sometimes we still don’t see the results we want.

According to sociologist Deborah Lupton, there are something like 160,000 tracking apps circulating the various app stores. These apps cover the full spectrum of personal improvement tools. Apps like RunKeeper, Google Fit, and Apple Health promise a “knowledge is power” approach to managing our health stats.

While it seems like this personal quantification stuff is a trend we’ve been witnessing over the past few years, it’s definitely not new. What we were curious about was whether people stuck with their tracking efforts long term.

And if so, does tracking yield any positive results?

We’ve been documenting ourselves since the dawn of time

Personal observations are super old. People have long been documenting their activities from bodily functions and what they ate to efforts at fitness. This 2010 NYT piece looked at a few people who kept detailed accounts of their lives. While some devices were on the scene in 2010, the process was largely analog.

These days, the connection between data and the body is something the masses can tap into. Where we used to only have analog observations to rely on, we now get to play scientist with state-of-the-art tools.

There are always going to be people obsessed with their stats, but it seems unsustainable for most of us to track, optimize, and monitor ourselves.

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The Quantified Self — is knowledge driving self-improvement?

People doing situpsThe Quantified Self movement believes that numbers bring a sense of logic to the table. These numbers underscore the emotions tied to our mistakes and other shortcomings. Fitness trackers give us a sense of accomplishment by sheer virtue of putting them on.

The data available so far doesn’t quite present a clear-cut solution as far as whether obsessive tracking pays off long term.

A 2015 study published by the American Journal of Public Medicine gave pedometers to one group of overweight women and fitness trackers to another. The women who used the trackers increased their activity by an average of 38 minutes a week. 

The pedometer group did not increase their fitness levels at all. So, here, we’re looking at two tools that essentially do the same thing. One cheers you on and sends little motivational alerts when you meet a goal, while the other just counts your steps.

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Another study from the Journal of the American Medical Association found that obese people who wore fitness trackers lost less weight over two years. Those who made an effort to eat healthily and exercise without the technology actually fared better.

One problem is inaccurate reporting. Devices are good at tracking steps, but anything more strenuous than walking is hard to quantify. So, looking into the data you collect yourself could present a warped perception of your overall fitness levels.

The JAMA participants might have looked at an app that told them they burned 800 calories when in reality, that number was closer to 400. These skewed numbers can make you think you need to eat more and consequently gain weight.

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What’s the point?

Well, okay. Maybe it’s a dumb question. The promise of tracking our bodies presents a means of gaining control over our mortality, our success, our appearance, and how we feel. Which, of course, sounds great.

But, we wonder, how many people know what to do with their “personal analytics?” If you’re considering a fitness tracker, it’s worth asking yourself a few questions.

  • What do you hope to learn?
  • What motivates you?
  • Do you plan on changing habits?

Admittedly, people are drowning in a data deluge. If you’re tracking sleep patterns, calories, steps, and workouts — what are you measuring, specifically?

Fitbit or not, old habits die hard

Lazy guy lounging

Are people using these new insights to improve in any way, or is it just fun to reap those digital rewards?

That’s hard to answer. Many people adopt these new tools in a sincere effort to change. For example, they might download an app like Sleep Cycle to monitor their habits and develop a routine, but the shine wears off quickly.

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A report published by the Associated Press found that fitness tracker owners abandon their devices after a few months of use. They say monotony is the reason for abandoning ship, which makes sense.

Users collect all this data, amassing this big, unwieldy set. It’s like tracking a marketing campaign without first setting any goals.

That’s not to say these tools can’t be helpful. However, like watching fitness videos instead of hitting the gym, you need to commit to the routine for a sustained period in order to see results.

Ultimately, JAMA declared fitness trackers “facilitators, not drivers” of behavior change. People get excited about these tools but rarely do they bridge the gap between knowledge and lasting change.

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