Apps are a huge part of modern life and play an important role in our health and fitness routines. These days, there are more applications than ever to help you achieve your fitness goals. Whether it’s tracking how many steps you take each day or providing calorie-counting charts for the food you eat at restaurants, the possibilities are endless.

With so many choices on the market, though, how do you know which apps are the best ones to help you stay healthy? Here are ten must-have features that every health and fitness app should have.

Find out Essential Features for Health and Fitness Apps

• User Personalization

When it comes to tracking the user’s daily activity and further evaluating the user’s fitness, the application needs to have the user’s personal information like age, height, gender, and weight. These will help the app ascertain accurate details. These enable users to customise the application as per their needs. You may also include essential features like:

• Creating user profiles
• Saving the statistics they get
• Planning personalised exercise routines
• Setting goals
• Comparing the progress

• Wearable and non-wearable device integration

Athletes can tap into wearable sensors in order to track information that includes but is not limited to heart rate, distance, pace, stride length, and cadence. Through this data, individuals can adjust their workout routine to suit their needs. 

For example, if a runner's average pace has fallen off over the past few weeks, the app might suggest running intervals at a faster speed with short recovery periods. Or, if an individual's weight goes up or down by more than five pounds (2.3 kilograms), it could automatically remind them to change their diet.

The same types of alerts could be set up based on sleep quality and duration as well as nutrition intake levels.

• Customised Diet Plans

Customized diet plans are tailored as per specific energy consumption needs. Also, a personalised diet is specially designed for your fitness. 

So if you have any choices, food intolerances, specific requirements, or food allergies, they are considered. You will be likely to stick to a plan that includes the foods you enjoy most of the time.

With customized diet plans, you can easily avoid the pitfalls of browsing through the market with no obvious intention or purpose.

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That’s why the shopping list and recipes with a customized diet plan are absolutely helpful. This way, they save time by making the planning and shopping experience easier and more purposeful.

• Tracking metrics

Measuring progress is an important part of the process. This can be done with a body composition device like a smart scale or with apps that track metrics like sleep patterns, heart rate, step count, or calorie burn. Any health app worth its salt should also include a food diary to help users keep tabs on what they eat and drink each day. 

Additionally, if you want to know how your workouts are going in the gym or how your runs are going outside, any good fitness app will include activity tracking and allow you to set goals based on duration, distance traveled, calories burned, steps taken per day, etc.

• Push Notifications

Push notifications have been one of the most integral parts of a successful app’s toolbox. Correct use of push notifications helps to improve not only engagement but also the average time spent in the app by users. 

Moreover, in fitness apps, push notifications can remind users of the start of a workout, the next mealtime, and other significant events. 

To extract the most out of push notifications, ensure you do not create them manually. Here we would recommend setting up marketing automation to send personalized push notifications based on the user journey. You can also employ specialized marketing automation tools for better user engagement.

• Goal Setting

The fundamental purpose of fitness apps is to enable users to bring themselves and their bodies to measurable results. The user sets the desired results themselves, meaning that the goal-setting process should be straightforward and clear. 

For instance, the Fitness Health Habit Tracker app focuses on setting goals related to sports activities and nutrition. The user must choose a task, set a target by inputting a goal value or a specific date, and then specify the action they need to do to achieve that goal.

• Social Sharing

In the age of social media, it is tough to imagine a fitness app without social integration. People love to communicate and showcase their accomplishments, so fitness tracking apps use such human weaknesses for their profit. 

Sharing things, chatting with friends, and interacting with others will enable users to spend more time in the app, positively impacting the app’s KPIs. For instance, the Nike Run Club app allows its users to share their results on a number of social media platforms:

• Telehealth

With the advancements in technology, it is now possible for doctors to give a detailed diagnosis without visiting the patient. Hospital apps with this feature are helpful for both the patient and the doctors. Doctors can come in video calls or chat with patients and give detailed opinions.

Many mobile app development company go the extra mile to add an interface for the doctors to add the details of the patients while giving the diagnosis via a telecall. This EHR (electronic health record) helps save time and increases productivity.

• Community

Building a vast community around a fitness app is the best way to engage and retain users. By seeing how friends or fitness influencers achieve their goals with the application, the users will be aware of this app's value.

For instance, Fitbit has the unique community feature where users can:

• Easily find friends who already use the app.
• Users can post updates about their activities.
• Users can meet like-minded people by joining interest groups.
• Users can easily follow other users or influencers in the app. 

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Another example is Fitplan, an app with a community feed where users can connect with friends and Fitplan trainers and share workouts and thoughts on several topics like nutrition, lifestyle, physique, etc. 

• Video tutorials

Fitness mobile applications have a rather diverse audience that prefers different methods of delivering relevant information. For those who like to perceive information visually, the app can implement video tutorials that show the techniques for specific workouts.

Videos are also motivating and contain music that cheers up the users. For example, the TRX workout app offers lots of training videos between 25 to 50 minutes. It is quite possible to sync the app with a fitness tracker and get various statistics.

• Nutrition Tracking Apps

Nutrition is the most significant feature of any fitness app. There are several nutrition tracking apps available in the market that enable users to control their weight by giving them data on burned calories, controlling water balance, and motivating users to encourage healthy food habits.

If a person is struggling with time sticking to healthy nutrition, the app must be able to create grocery shopping lists and collect healthy food recipes.

Summing Up!

So, these are the must-have features of health and fitness apps. These features will make your fitness app interesting and useful and attract more users. Features like user personalization, customized diet plans, push notifications, social sharing, etc., play a significant role in making a health and fitness app stand apart.

So whenever you decide to get the app developed by any fitness app development company, make sure you integrate all these features into your application.