Whether you want to tone up, build muscle, or set a new personal record, the right fitness app can help you achieve your goal. And today’s fitness apps aren’t only good for surfacing your performance metrics; they’re beautifully designed, adding whimsy to motivate you along your fitness journey.
Here are six of our favorite fitness app UIs that are inspiring examples of fun and function.
Your goals, your workout
Fitness app culture has a dark side: many are focused on appearance, not health, exacerbating the risk of eating disorders and missing the goal of holistic wellness.
Freeletics isn’t one of these apps. From registration screens onwards, Freeletics is a choose-your-own-adventure app, letting you determine your goals—not by defaulting to weight loss, but rather by providing a myriad of reasons to exercise and letting you choose your preference.
The sliding scale and ranking systems utilized by Freeletics in putting together personalized workout plans reflect the nuances, and numerous benefits, of working out: you can lose weight while reducing stress, without having to compromise on either one.
Yoga rebel
Asana Rebel has everything you want not just for fitness, but for holistic, real-talk wellness. It’s the Target of wellness apps—it has a little bit of everything.
The app’s minimalist black-and-white design make it a wonderful, not-at-all-overwhelming home for a whole spectrum of wellness-related features. Marrying a daily plank challenge with quizzes, workout collections—including a great one for the desk monkeys among us—and playlists for focus, sleep, and the day in between isn’t easy. Just listing them was dizzying—but somehow, still, scrolling the app is relaxing.
Every thumb scroll brings up something new that I can do right now that will benefit not just my fitness level, but my wellness.
To the beat of the music
Have you ever struggled to find the right rhythm in your workouts? Do you find yourself wondering how long you should spend on each exercise rep? The FitWave Timer allows you to create custom timers to help complete exercises in the right rhythm.
Olga designed the app in a dark theme so the key elements pop: sliders to set up your timer, the timer’s progress, and the pause button. The app’s menu exemplifies simplicity, only giving you the option to set up a timer, see your existing timers, or view your settings.
Forget the workout buddy: meet the workout bot
Virgil Pana showcases a different approach to a fitness app with a chatbot that makes the data collection process more personal and fun.
Fitsy, the AI, acts like a virtual personal trainer, helping you make decisions based on your stats and goals. Fitsy asks questions in a text-inspired layout, and you can select your answers from different buttons, or by using a slider.
Walk it off
Japanese fitness app FiNC lets you see all the activities that raise your heart rate in one place. That might be a lot of information to take in, but designer Thabo Mbuyisa utilized simple design and excellent organization to make this seemingly-complex information both accessible and understandable.
Within the app, you can see the total exercise time and number of calories burned on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, with a graph showing how your activity compares to previous days.
All together now
How can you get an entire city to improve their fitness? With an outstanding app experience, of course! The city of Dubai launched the Dubai Fitness Challenge to encourage residents to participate in 30 minutes of exercise for 30 days. It worked, too—one million people, out of Dubai’s three million residents, participated in the 2018 challenge.
The iOS and Android apps were released within five months of each other and were instrumental in increasing participation. Designer Sandy Machado says, “Users had the ability to track their workouts, explore fitness classes, see where they ranked on the leaderboard, view events, and create social groups to help encourage their fitness.”
Do you have more awesome examples of fitness apps to share with us? Let us know on Twitter: @InVisionApp.
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Emily has written for some of the top tech companies, covering everything from creative copywriting to UX design. When she's not writing, she's traveling the world (next stop: Japan!), brewing kombucha, and biking through the Pacific Northwest.
