5 fun health apps to try this week

There is an app for almost anything and more often than not, using apps to track your lifestyle can be draining not only on your battery life but your energy too! So how do you choose the ones which will add to your life rather than telling you how much you didn't work out last week and just making you feel bad? I want to tell you about five fun health apps that are different from of the rest, because if you find one that really works for you it can make a difference!

1. Fitocracy

This app mimics the kind the of competitive level and point system that you would see in a game to encourage competitiveness. If you're spurred on by this kind of motivation, this app provides you with a community of Fitocrats, other like minded people and claims to give you everything you need to become addicted to fitness. Although this is also offered by the Nike+ app, this app that gives you points based on the difficulty of the workouts that you have done at home or at the gym and allows you to track all of your fitness progress!

2. Im2Calorie

Meal times can be an interactive mind field between taking a picture of your incredible recipe creation and if you're into it then logging the meal too! If you have ever used myfitnesspal you will know that if can be quite time consuming to search for the items of food that you eat at every moment of the day. So what if you could combine both of these activities in one go? This app from Google (although it is yet to be released, sorry!) uses advanced image recognition technology to determine the size of the food and then works out how many calories are in the food! The only downside is at first this app won't be able to tell you other nutritional information like the fats and sugar content of food but developers claim that in time with more users there will be more data to access.

3. Sworkit

This is one of the most comprehensive health apps there is. This is a no frills app that is designed to Simply - Work It and it really does makes at home exercises challenging and easy with no equipment required.  All you have to do is select the kind of training you want to do, strength cardio, yoga or stretching then the body part that you would like to focus on, or choose full body and how much time you have to work out. Then the app gives you a circuit of exercises that you complete to the time. No need to count any repetitions just workout out so the timer, because who has the concentration to count you're busting your gut anyway?! Perfect!

4. Up by Jawbone Fitness

This is a running app which offers different features to motivate you to run rather than just being a tracker. It can be used along with a Jawbone fitness tracker, but even if you don't have one, the Smart Coach feature takes the statistics from your workout, such as how many steps you take on your run and activity the data to create personal motivational tips for you.  This is more than just a notification to remind you  get up and go for a jog, This is more of a support app to that syncs up with a lot of other tracking apps that you probably already to hold you more accountable so that you actually use them to work towards meeting your goals.

5. Jaha

Think Tinder but for working out. Jaha's vision is to be "the world’s largest location-based mobile app that brings local people together to participate in sports and fitness activities." Because we are proud ambassadors of working out with your BFFF to help make you accountable and of course make your workouts more fun, we think this is a great idea because not everyone has friends that share their passion for fitness! It happens. This app shows your activity data as part of your profile to help you meet like minded people with similar fitness levels and goals near you to work out with. Of course you should be careful with such kinds of meet up apps, be sure to meet in a public place and tell someone where you are going and when!

It can be rewarding to see how your pace became faster over a month and it can be helpful to know at what time of day you're able to give your fullest to your workouts but if you find this kind of planning and tracking stressful I suggest that you spend the time making a kickass playlist that you'll want to listen to every time you work out and just enjoy the process!