Posts in category: 10 Best Workout Apps for Beginners in 2026

Fitbit (owned by Google) is a great Apple Fitness alternative if you don’t have an iPhone or Apple Watch (though you can use it if you do, too). In addition to activity tracking, the app offers sleep, food, water, menstrual cycle, glucose, and weight tracking—which are great features if you’re trying to be healthier overall. Like Apple Fitness, it has badges for achievements, which I loved since I don’t want to compete against anyone except myself. It also offers daily readiness scores if you use it with a Fitbit wearable.

The Best Workout Apps for 2026

When it comes to calorie and nutrition tracking, accuracy matters. Christina is a health commerce staff writer at Fortune with more than a decade of experience crafting engaging content for digital platforms. To join Apple Fitness Plus, you can try it out for free for up to three months and then have the option to pay month-to-month, $10 or $80 for the year. If you’re on a family plan, you can share access to Apple Fitness Plus with up to five family members.

Adidas Running by Runtastic

Just keep in mind that although the instructors provide modifications, true beginners may find most of these workouts too challenging. You can also search by muscle group, workout focus, and equipment to find a class. Our Retro Fitness App helps you along your fitness journey on your own time, wherever you are.

For those who like to break a sweat at home , this list of the best fitness apps are your friend. Not only will each one help you stay in shape by way of targeted exercises and extended plans, but many will do so free of charge. Load up your smartphone or strap on your Fitbit Rebel and get to work. Workout apps can be especially appealing for beginners because they provide both convenience and guidance.

We chose TR(AI)NER by Element 26 as the best workout app for weightlifting because of its comprehensiveness. Yes, with newer workout apps, such as Future, you can get connected to a personal trainer through an app. It will cost more compared with other apps but will be cheaper than a standard personal training session at the gym. SmartWOD is the best CrossFit workout app, featuring tools for timing and generating high-intensity workouts.

Best Free Workout Apps: Get Started on the Road to Fitness

If you’re an outdoors person, especially runs and rides, Strava is the perfect app for you. Use our quick round-up below to immediately find an app that fits your needs – and you can read more about it by jumping to our full write-ups and explanations using the links. While deciding which fitness app to sign up for, experts recommend thinking through the following factors, all of which I took into consideration while creating our list of favorites. You might have memories of jumping rope with your friends at school.

Are There Any Downsides to Workout Apps?

The process begins with a comprehensive consultation where you discuss goals, experience, lifestyle, and available equipment. Your coach then creates a completely personalized program, not a template modified slightly for you. AI-powered virtual trainer providing customized workouts with real-time adaptive coaching and comprehensive progress tracking. We selected StretchIt as the best fitness app for stretching because we found the content to be effective, enjoyable to follow and simple to track progress.

The app’s database contains more than 6 million foods, so you can log just about everything you put in your body, from fast food to homemade vegan lasagna, thanks to a nifty recipe calculator. Tracking your lifts can be the perfect encouragement to keep on keepin’ on. If you’ve wanted to try running but never known where to start, Couch to 5K should be the next app you download. All you need is 30 to 40 minutes a day, 3 times a week, for 8 weeks. This study was interesting (and very positive), but because was a cross-sectional study, we can’t draw conclusions about causality.

Best kettlebell workout app

• Obé Fitness is designed for beginners, pros, and anyone who tends to stray from the typical exercises you’d do in a gym.
• If you’re traveling or stuck at home, and even if your gym is closed, you can pull out your phone and get a great workout done wherever you are.
• Whether your goal is to lose weight, build strength, perform at your peak or improve your overall health, keeping an accurate food journal of what you eat and drink is essential.
• A seamless, intuitive interface was another key factor, making it easy to navigate classes, track progress, and stay engaged.
• Down Dog is changing that by offering a brand new yoga practice every time you come to your trusty yoga mat.
• It took until 2019, but you can finally buy a mirror that can help you work out!

Creating and following a fitness plan yourself, or with the help of a coach, will ensure you are getting the most out of your time and money. This AI-powered is strava premium worth it strength training app curates workouts for you based on your initial fitness levels and daily readiness. The more you log your data, the more your algorithm learns in an effort to keep you progressing through PRs.

How can you make workout apps most effective?

You get three free programs upfront and, if you like the experience, the subscription is priced at a modest $14.99 per month. You can get it on the brand’s website or on either the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. You’ll also want to figure out whether the app’s classes require you to have certain pieces of equipment on hand, like dumbbells or a yoga mat. Make sure you either have these items, or you have the budget to purchase them. I recommend it to anyone who prefers yoga as their main form of exercise. The instruction was an area our tester emphasized, rating it a 4 out of 5.

Sign up today to get 7 days absolutely for free, on iPhone, iPad, Android or on our website to improve flexibility, aid recovery, reduce pain, and enhance range of motion with our mobility app. Joining Lasta isn’t just about exercising and becoming part of a community. This app brings together fitness newbies and veterans in a supportive online space where everyone cheers for each other. If you’re thinking about working out but need help figuring out where to start, try yoga. According to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, yoga is a low-impact and safe form of physical activity.

Is there any fitness app without a subscription?

You can work out with celebrity coaches and even invite your friends to work out with you. Simply log the foods you eat using one of our easy food tracking tools, and we’ll show you a complete nutritional breakdown for each food, meal, day, and even week. Any way you want to look at your data, you’ll gain a better understanding of your personal nutrition so you can make smart choices that align with your weight, health, and fitness goals. Alix Turoff, RD, a New York City–based registered dietitian and National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM)–certified personal trainer, loves that you can also swap out exercises and modify workouts. “This is great if you have an injury or just aren’t feeling a specific exercise that day,” she says. Exercise apps are abundant, and narrowing down the list can seem daunting.

Jump Rope Training

If you already work with a trainer, it is worth asking whether they use an app to program and track your workouts, allowing you to combine professional expertise with the convenience of digital tools. The nutrition features complement the training programs, with meal planning tools, macro tracking, and the ability to share recipes. This holistic approach enables trainers to provide complete lifestyle coaching rather than just workout programming. Trainers can create comprehensive workout plans with video demonstrations, rest timers, and progression tracking. The workout builder is intuitive yet detailed, allowing for complete customization based on each client’s needs, equipment access, and goals.

And, if you’re a beginner, no worries— a variety of levels, intensities, and class lengths are offered. Aside from yoga, guided meditation and breathwork classes are also available in the app to get you super chill before or after executing child’s pose. We offer personal training, small group strength & conditioning sessions and team workouts to help you get real with your goals. Most of our personal training programs are heart rate monitored for safe and powerful sessions. The app uses algorithms to provide customized coaching programs for various goals, with workouts including trainer-led videos and detailed exercise tutorials. After completing exercises, you rate difficulty, allowing the AI to adjust subsequent workouts for optimal challenge.

How to choose the workout app for you

As with most things in the age of the internet, you can find super niche fitness programs that give you exactly what you’re looking for in a home workout. That said, it touches on women’s health topics in many of its curated programs, like syncing workouts to your menstrual cycle and aging. If you’re someone who is new to exercising or has a specific goal in mind, you can take Obé’s quiz, and based on your answers, the app creates a personalized fitness plan for you that refreshes as you go.

Fitbit (owned by Google) is a great Apple Fitness alternative if you don’t have an iPhone or Apple Watch (though you can use it if you do, too). In addition to activity tracking, the app offers sleep, food, water, menstrual cycle, glucose, and weight tracking—which are great features if you’re trying to be healthier overall. Like Apple Fitness, it has badges for achievements, which I loved since I don’t want to compete against anyone except myself. It also offers daily readiness scores if you use it with a Fitbit wearable.

The Best Workout Apps for 2026

When it comes to calorie and nutrition tracking, accuracy matters. Christina is a health commerce staff writer at Fortune with more than a decade of experience crafting engaging content for digital platforms. To join Apple Fitness Plus, you can try it out for free for up to three months and then have the option to pay month-to-month, $10 or $80 for the year. If you’re on a family plan, you can share access to Apple Fitness Plus with up to five family members.

Adidas Running by Runtastic

Just keep in mind that although the instructors provide modifications, true beginners may find most of these workouts too challenging. You can also search by muscle group, workout focus, and equipment to find a class. Our Retro Fitness App helps you along your fitness journey on your own time, wherever you are.

For those who like to break a sweat at home , this list of the best fitness apps are your friend. Not only will each one help you stay in shape by way of targeted exercises and extended plans, but many will do so free of charge. Load up your smartphone or strap on your Fitbit Rebel and get to work. Workout apps can be especially appealing for beginners because they provide both convenience and guidance.

We chose TR(AI)NER by Element 26 as the best workout app for weightlifting because of its comprehensiveness. Yes, with newer workout apps, such as Future, you can get connected to a personal trainer through an app. It will cost more compared with other apps but will be cheaper than a standard personal training session at the gym. SmartWOD is the best CrossFit workout app, featuring tools for timing and generating high-intensity workouts.

Best Free Workout Apps: Get Started on the Road to Fitness

If you’re an outdoors person, especially runs and rides, Strava is the perfect app for you. Use our quick round-up below to immediately find an app that fits your needs – and you can read more about it by jumping to our full write-ups and explanations using the links. While deciding which fitness app to sign up for, experts recommend thinking through the following factors, all of which I took into consideration while creating our list of favorites. You might have memories of jumping rope with your friends at school.

Are There Any Downsides to Workout Apps?

The process begins with a comprehensive consultation where you discuss goals, experience, lifestyle, and available equipment. Your coach then creates a completely personalized program, not a template modified slightly for you. AI-powered virtual trainer providing customized workouts with real-time adaptive coaching and comprehensive progress tracking. We selected StretchIt as the best fitness app for stretching because we found the content to be effective, enjoyable to follow and simple to track progress.

The app’s database contains more than 6 million foods, so you can log just about everything you put in your body, from fast food to homemade vegan lasagna, thanks to a nifty recipe calculator. Tracking your lifts can be the perfect encouragement to keep on keepin’ on. If you’ve wanted to try running but never known where to start, Couch to 5K should be the next app you download. All you need is 30 to 40 minutes a day, 3 times a week, for 8 weeks. This study was interesting (and very positive), but because was a cross-sectional study, we can’t draw conclusions about causality.

Best kettlebell workout app

• Obé Fitness is designed for beginners, pros, and anyone who tends to stray from the typical exercises you’d do in a gym.
• If you’re traveling or stuck at home, and even if your gym is closed, you can pull out your phone and get a great workout done wherever you are.
• Whether your goal is to lose weight, build strength, perform at your peak or improve your overall health, keeping an accurate food journal of what you eat and drink is essential.
• A seamless, intuitive interface was another key factor, making it easy to navigate classes, track progress, and stay engaged.
• Down Dog is changing that by offering a brand new yoga practice every time you come to your trusty yoga mat.
• It took until 2019, but you can finally buy a mirror that can help you work out!

Creating and following a fitness plan yourself, or with the help of a coach, will ensure you are getting the most out of your time and money. This AI-powered is strava premium worth it strength training app curates workouts for you based on your initial fitness levels and daily readiness. The more you log your data, the more your algorithm learns in an effort to keep you progressing through PRs.

How can you make workout apps most effective?

You get three free programs upfront and, if you like the experience, the subscription is priced at a modest $14.99 per month. You can get it on the brand’s website or on either the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. You’ll also want to figure out whether the app’s classes require you to have certain pieces of equipment on hand, like dumbbells or a yoga mat. Make sure you either have these items, or you have the budget to purchase them. I recommend it to anyone who prefers yoga as their main form of exercise. The instruction was an area our tester emphasized, rating it a 4 out of 5.

Sign up today to get 7 days absolutely for free, on iPhone, iPad, Android or on our website to improve flexibility, aid recovery, reduce pain, and enhance range of motion with our mobility app. Joining Lasta isn’t just about exercising and becoming part of a community. This app brings together fitness newbies and veterans in a supportive online space where everyone cheers for each other. If you’re thinking about working out but need help figuring out where to start, try yoga. According to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, yoga is a low-impact and safe form of physical activity.

Is there any fitness app without a subscription?

You can work out with celebrity coaches and even invite your friends to work out with you. Simply log the foods you eat using one of our easy food tracking tools, and we’ll show you a complete nutritional breakdown for each food, meal, day, and even week. Any way you want to look at your data, you’ll gain a better understanding of your personal nutrition so you can make smart choices that align with your weight, health, and fitness goals. Alix Turoff, RD, a New York City–based registered dietitian and National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM)–certified personal trainer, loves that you can also swap out exercises and modify workouts. “This is great if you have an injury or just aren’t feeling a specific exercise that day,” she says. Exercise apps are abundant, and narrowing down the list can seem daunting.

Jump Rope Training

If you already work with a trainer, it is worth asking whether they use an app to program and track your workouts, allowing you to combine professional expertise with the convenience of digital tools. The nutrition features complement the training programs, with meal planning tools, macro tracking, and the ability to share recipes. This holistic approach enables trainers to provide complete lifestyle coaching rather than just workout programming. Trainers can create comprehensive workout plans with video demonstrations, rest timers, and progression tracking. The workout builder is intuitive yet detailed, allowing for complete customization based on each client’s needs, equipment access, and goals.

And, if you’re a beginner, no worries— a variety of levels, intensities, and class lengths are offered. Aside from yoga, guided meditation and breathwork classes are also available in the app to get you super chill before or after executing child’s pose. We offer personal training, small group strength & conditioning sessions and team workouts to help you get real with your goals. Most of our personal training programs are heart rate monitored for safe and powerful sessions. The app uses algorithms to provide customized coaching programs for various goals, with workouts including trainer-led videos and detailed exercise tutorials. After completing exercises, you rate difficulty, allowing the AI to adjust subsequent workouts for optimal challenge.

How to choose the workout app for you

As with most things in the age of the internet, you can find super niche fitness programs that give you exactly what you’re looking for in a home workout. That said, it touches on women’s health topics in many of its curated programs, like syncing workouts to your menstrual cycle and aging. If you’re someone who is new to exercising or has a specific goal in mind, you can take Obé’s quiz, and based on your answers, the app creates a personalized fitness plan for you that refreshes as you go.

Its subscription is pricier than some, but the value lies in its dynamic, personalized programming that keeps your training effective and engaging. It serves as the primary hub for anyone using a Garmin device, syncing everything from daily steps and sleep to advanced performance analytics like VO2 Max, Training Status, and Recovery Time. The platform excels at providing a holistic view of your physiological state, directly linking your daily habits to your training outcomes. The nutrition features complement the training programs, with meal planning tools, macro tracking, and the ability to share recipes. This holistic approach enables trainers to provide complete lifestyle coaching rather than just workout programming. Trainers can create comprehensive workout plans with video demonstrations, rest timers, and progression tracking.

During the pandemic, the most common reasons for using fitness trackers were to track different measurements (e.g., distance run or walked, heart rate), and to receive reminders to move. Over half (147/274, 53.6%) agreed that fitness trackers helped them incorporate more activity in their daily lives. An anonymous online survey was hosted on the Qualtrics platform [37]. In our social media advertisements, we also asked people to share the study with their networks (e.g., re-tweet on Twitter), in order to expand the geographical scope of the study. Eligible study participants were adults aged over 18 years who were proficient in English.

Best App for Personal Trainers – FitBudd

As you already know, long-term fitness goals are usually those you aim to achieve within 6-12 months. The following are some of the most frequently asked questions about setting health and fitness goals, along with answers to help guide your journey. Again, you don’t necessarily need to rewrite your long-term fitness goals at this point; just make sure that they are really important to you. If you want to look into this on a deeper level, check out my blog post about ‘knowing your why’. Now, let’s make sure that ALL your long-term health and fitness goals feel achievable.

Best overall workout app

Exercise library includes beginner through advanced variations though progression guidance limited. Workout scheduling flexible though not adaptive to individual performance or recovery needs. Interface simple but functional across different user experience levels.

Can I use workout apps offline?

Another possible explanation is linked to the type of health activities that can be accommodated in health apps. Future research is needed to explore how the adoption of mobile devices might differ by gender and how to design health interventions to reduce the existing gender differences in adoption. Strong is a minimalist yet powerful workout logger designed for lifters who prioritize efficiency and progressive overload. Its core strength lies in its clean, intuitive interface that makes logging sets, reps, and weight incredibly fast, eliminating friction during your workout.

“The instructors provide modifications for people of different fitness levels as well, so you can choose a specific intensity, but still expect to have modifications available for your level,” MacPherson says. Offerings include ashtanga, hatha, kundalini, restorative prenatal, vinyasa, HIIT flow, and kids yoga. Perfect your backbends and inversions, learn how to boost sleep quality, or release stress and shift energy on a seven-day meditation journey. Whether you’ve let your exercise routine fade or have yet to start one, a fitness app may help you get on track. The platform’s strength lies in its sheer volume and diversity of available applications, catering to every imaginable fitness need. Users benefit from straightforward subscription management tied to their Google account and the integration of Google Health Connect, which allows different apps to share health data seamlessly.

What are SMART fitness goals?

The app helps users by offering training for birth and advice on postpartum healing and strengthening. It uses the company’s proprietary method for strengthening the core. This app may be best suited to people who want to add an incentive to everyday exercise. This includes a monthly $6.99 fee, a yearly $49.99 fee, or a VIP subscription for $89.99 a year. The app displays pace and distance results in an easy-to-read graph so a person can track their performance. The My Plan dashboard provides custom training plans based on a person’s answers to a series of questions, or a person can select from the ready-made schedules.

Programming

This risk-free approach demonstrates confidence in their content’s effectiveness. We selected Pliability as the best app for recovery and mobility because it addresses an area most people neglect yet could benefit from enormously. Poor mobility causes compensatory movement patterns, increases injury risk, and limits performance. ATG is perfect for athletes looking to maximize performance, anyone dealing with chronic joint pain, post-surgery recovery, or simply those who want to bulletproof their body for long-term athletic pursuits.

• Each activity you log with your watch is also collected in the app, so you can view insights such as distance and pace, calories burned, and average heart rate.
• No need to have Peloton equipment when you can have access to the app with a subscription.
• After you input your goals, experience level, and available training days, the app builds a personalized plan (whether you’re training for a 5K, half marathon, or marathon).
• The platform excels at providing a holistic view of your physiological state, directly linking your daily habits to your training outcomes.
• In addition to self-reported changes, studies using objective smartphone-based data also showed a decline in daily step count worldwide [5,7].
• This isn’t about short-lived progress—it’s about creating a foundation for lifelong health and strength.

The Best Workout Leggings

Design powerful, science-based training programs that enhance strength, speed, and performance for athletes and fitness clients alike. Anecdotal evidence tends to be positive, but scientific studies are yet to conclude whether fitness apps significantly improve health in the general population. A person may wish to speak with a doctor before starting a new exercise program or using a workout app to ensure they are choosing exercises that will be safe for them to do. Working with a doctor can help them pick the most appropriate form of exercise if they have health conditions. At an additional cost, users can access personalized health coaching and have private chats with fitness coaches. You’re interested, motivated, and just looking for visuals, expertise, and possibly a virtual community to share fitness with.

One Event. ISSA’s Global Community.

The most important thing is that it helps you reach your goals safely and effectively. However, for $11.99 per month, the app allows you to participate in asynchronous competitions, set and track goals, create training plans, and measure your performance. Approximately 40% of participants had increased their daily steps by more than 1,000 at the one- and two-year marks. People in the low step category had the greatest increase, averaging almost 2,000 more steps per day from their baseline at one year and maintaining that number at two years.

When I tried out this app, I signed up for a kettlebell class called Body & Bell, and what’s great is you get video demonstrations for the different exercises you’ll be doing. The videos also tell you the type of weight you should be using (light, medium, heavy) and the length of time of the exercise. You can also connect with your coach via the chat in the app if you ever have questions about your training or want to chat with other members on your team. This app costs $25 a month ($135 a year) but lets you test it for free for seven days if you’re a new member.

If you like to run outdoors, for example, you’d likely want an app that offers location tracking. Similarly, when looking into a specific app, figure out whether its classes require you to have certain equipment on-hand, like dumbbells or a yoga mat. It also connects you to friends on the app who can cheer you on or comment on your posts that get uploaded to your Strava feed after your workout. If you prefer to keep your data and running routes private, you can also make those changes through your settings via the app. One of the newer safety features on the Strava app is called the Beacon, which lets you share your location in real time with an emergency contact. The app’s beautiful design and intuitive interface remove friction from tracking your nutrition, making it easy to maintain consistency.

How do you choose the best exercise tracker?

This is the first step towards showing commitment to your long-term goals. The worksheet will also fitness website contact introduce you to the next important phase of preparation for achieving your goal. In the context of long-term health goals examples like the one above, how long has it been since you’ve fitted those jeans? If you’ve never fitted them, maybe your smart goal examples for health are not realistic or achievable.

Fitness Coach

Apps automatically adjust workout intensity based on actual performance data rather than generic fitness level assumptions. Been testing workout apps across different fitness levels for past eighteen months and the difference between adaptive and static apps is enormous. Good apps from fitness app development companies recognize when you’re ready for bigger challenges or need recovery periods. Bad apps stick to rigid programs that ignore individual progress and life circumstances. Now you have access to various workout programs that can be done at home or in the gym, such as yoga, strength and Pilates, all taught by different women personal trainers.