You Should Get A Fitness App!
Last night, my roommate kept asking me about the ingredients I was using to make a delicious homemade Japanese curry and recording them. In the beginning, I thought she just wanted to know the process of making a curry. Later, I found out that she was putting those ingredients’ names into a mobile app. “I’m just trying to put all the food I have eaten tonight into my fitness app one by one,” she explained.
Fitness apps, which are also called health tracker apps, are not a new genre of mobile apps, but they are getting increasingly popular for people of different ages. In the first quarter of 2019, the revenue for the health and fitness category was approximately $385million worldwide, and it will keep growing in the future. Fitness apps are a popular trend in society, and I think it is good to have one in our lives, but why?
Types of Fitness Apps
Before trying to figure out the reasons why people are attracted by fitness apps, we should understand the types of fitness apps on the market. Health-tracker apps can be classified into three types. The first type of fitness app is a workout app, it provides information for their users about what exercise the users can do to achieve their ideal body shape. The second type is nutrition and diet app. For example, one of the famous nutrition and diet app is MyFitnessPal, it is used to track the users’ eating habits and measuring their water intake and calorie intake as well, so they can use those data to assist them to build up a better diet pattern and reach their weight goal. The third type is activity tracking app, users would pair up with their gadgets to record their daily physical activity, including steps taken, stairs climbed, hours slept, distance travelled and calories burned via their tracking app.
Three Reasons You Should Get a Fitness App!
Personally speaking, there are three major reasons that everyone should get a health-tracker app.
Learning Through Modelling
Learning through modelling can be both benefit and harm for us, but modelling others to use health-tracker apps would definitely be beneficial for us because it can lead people to be more aware of their personal health and well-being. Modelling influences figure prominently in human learning in everyday life, and this can be reflected in this phenomenon. In contemporary society, more and more social media channels are spreading various eating habits such as low-carbohydrate diets, vegetarian diets and gluten-free diets. While people are using these nutrition apps, and receiving these kinds of healthy eating habits through those platforms, they will be learnt and influenced by those apps deliberately and inadvertently. Therefore, absorbing and influencing this nutrition information on these nutrition apps, they would be more concerned and following what those sources suggested to do in-order-to build their own healthy eating patterns.
Doing Exercise in a Playful Way
Gamification is a valid way to motivate and increase interactive among users. Gamification means putting game design elements into non-game contexts, which can be found in health-tracker apps nowadays.
Usually, there are some typical strategies in these health-tracker apps to facilitate and encourage users on using their apps. For example, these apps would allow users to share their workout records with their friends, such as running distance and pace and establish a ranking for users. Nike + Run Club is a great example which allows users to link up their accounts to social media platforms and sharing their workout activity records on those social platforms. Through this progress, it can effectively establish a competitive spirit and stimulate people to do more exercise. I believe that gamification in fitness apps could be a sort of motivation to push us to do as much as we can, so we should get one in our daily lives.
Exercise More, Save More
Awarding points, metals or virtual currency is another way of gamification, and it is another reason you should get a health tracker app since it sounds cost-effective that we can save money while we are doing exercise. In-order-to encourages users to be more active in their fitness app and allow them to collect their workout data. For example, MLC Life Insurance has launched the “MLC on Track” programme to monitor their clients’ ‘step information’, and if they achieve the step target before a specific deadline, then they can get a special 5% deduction of their insurance fee. These kinds of insurance programmes are effective in motivating more people to be active in using activity tracking apps. My mum, for example, is participating in a similar insurance programme, and I discovered that after she joined this programme, she does more exercise. For instance, she walks more from place to place, instead of taking transportation. She told me that she can save more money to do or buy extra things because of the insurance programme. Therefore, considering the financial aspect, it is worth giving a chance for these kinds of gamified fitness app.
Even though there are still some potential risks for health tracker apps, such as privacy issue, I believe that no matter in which types of fitness apps, they are effective for motivating people to do more exercises and reminding them about the importance of maintaining a healthy and appropriate lifestyle. So, it will never be too late to get a fitness app!
