I use my iPhone for just about everything. From online purchases, reading books, managing my (crappy) fantasy football teams, managing my email accounts, keeping up with the Brewers and Packers, and even renting movies. But I never really thought I would be using it to help me achieve my health and fitness goals. I have several apps on my iPhone that help me manage my weight, nutrition, stress levels, and track my sleep patterns. Below are some apps and websites that you can use for little or no cost to help manage your health and fitness and help you reach your goals.
Stress Check (Azumio)
Just as the title sounds, this app helps you better track and monitor your current stress levels. Specifically, it tracks your heart rate variability (HRV). HRV is a marker that, in simplistic terms, monitors the variances in the time between your heart beats over a relatively short duration (roughly 2 minutes). By monitoring these variances, this app can determine a rough idea how much stress your nervous system is under at any given point. Everybody responds to stress differently. There are two different types of stress, good stress, or eustress, and bad stress, or distress. Something as simple as seeing a picture of something can trigger stress in your brain, and release hormones that effect your flight or fight response, which in turn effects your heart rate variability. Even something such as eating a meal can effect your HRV. This marker is becoming more and more popular among the athletic world to help track overtraining. By tracking changes in your HRV when taking this measurement at approximately the same time everyday can help show when your body is reacting negatively to too much training or poor recovery habits. With this app all you need to do is place your index finger of the camera lens and flash of your iPhone for about 2 minutes. You are then given a reading on your current stress level given as a percentage. A low level of stress is reflected in a lower number and visa versa. By setting up an account with Azumio (free) you can log all your readings and monitor changes within the app.
Sleep Time (Azumio)
Have you ever wondered why you wake up feeling more tired then you did when you went to bed even though you "slept" for 8 hours? This app monitors your movement throughout the night to determine your sleep cycles. You can also use this app as an alarm, which will go off when your body is best suited to wake up based on your current sleep state. The alarm will not go off if you are in a REM cycle of sleep unless it reaches the latest time to go off. It will wait until your body is ready to wake up for the alarm to go off. All you need to do is set your alarm for the latest time you want to wake up and then place the phone face down on your bed next to you and fall asleep. You will be provided with a chart of your sleep cycles and sleep efficiency rating given to you in a percentage. The higher the number the higher quality of sleep you had. They claim ideally you want a sleep efficiency rating of 85% or higher. Again, if you set up an account with Azumio, you can log and track all your sleep patterns and find how your training cycles, diet, bedtimes, and levels of stress effect your sleep.
Heart Rate (Azumio)
This app uses the same technology that you'll see in hospitals with the little finger clip they will place on your index finger to determine the concentration of oxygen in your blood. All you do is place your index finger over the camera lens and flash for about 30 seconds and you will be given a heart rate, which you can choose to log if you have an account with Azumio. Personally I use this app to check my resting heart rate every morning I wake up. I use this number in conjunction with the Stress Check app to help me monitor my stress levels in relationship to my training volume to prevent any potential overtraining.
SweetBeat (SweetWater Health)
SweetBeat is a more accurate and more technical app that helps track and log your heart rate variability. Personally I do not have or use this app, but heard nothing but good things about it. To use this app you will need two items above and beyond just the app. You will need some sort of heart rate monitor chest strap and a doggle that plugs into your iPhone to pick up the chest strap. This app will naturally be more accurate as it uses a chest strap to monitor your HRV, rather than just placing your finger over the lens on your phone. It also has a food log feature that allows you to track how your HRV reacts to food. By doing this you can actually find any potential food allergies you may be unaware of.
MyPlate (livestrong.com)
This app works in conjunction with the myplate.com website, with is operated through livestrong.com. It can be used to track your daily food intake and track your caloric intake and expenditure. Both the website and app are easy to use and have a large data base of most foods. This app also allows you to track your daily weight to help motivate you to reaching your goals. It also allows you to create meals made up of multiple types of foods and save them to your account to save you time for commonly eaten meals. Once you set up your free account, you input your personal numbers (height, weight, goal weight, activity level, etc) and you are given a daily calorie goal and you do your best to follow the guidelines you achieve your goal weight.
TrainingPeaks.com
This is another great website that allows you to track your food intake. I have never used this log, but have also heard a lot of good things about it. This website also allows you to track your training/workouts along with your daily food intake. You can also purchase training plans for a variety of goals as well as nutritional plans to follow to help achieve your goals.
NutritionData.com
This is a free website with no needed account or membership. Just as the name suggests, this website is a large data base of nutritional information for just about every type of food. The nice thing with this site over pretty much every other nutrition database online, is the amount of information you get. This site provides the most in depth nutrition information from specific amino acid breakdowns, fat breakdowns, and overall food rating, even glycemic ratings and inflammatory ratings on all foods.
These are just a few of the resources available for the tech savvy health nut. I think most of these apps are at least worth checking out, as all of them are either free or $0.99.
Good Luck! Be fast, be strong, and carry on!
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