10 Best Fitness Apps For Your Apple Watch In 2023

The proliferation of health and fitness apps that have emerged in the wake of the smartphone era have truly revolutionized personal training. No matter the sport or form of exercise, there is an app for that, putting the kind of performance tracking and guidance usually only available through working with a professional in the palm of every user's hand.

Therein, however, lay the shortcoming. While smartphones are robust app platforms, they're not exactly designed or equipped to be a direct part of your exercise routine. Thankfully, wearables like the Apple Watch help fix that. The Cupertino tech giant's entree into wearable tech is perfectly positioned to be the fitness partner of your dreams, equipped as it is with sensors to track various metrics and a size, weight, and wearability profile that makes it a go-anywhere device. Apple has placed a big emphasis on biometrics, rolling out new sensors and features with every iteration, and it's turned the Apple Watch into a powerful tool for achieving fitness goals.

Of course, while the hardware goes a long way, it needs the right applications to realize its full potential. Fortunately, a whole host of developers have been quick to jump on the Apple Watch's capabilities and design apps that take full advantage of them. This has led to something of a crowded field, but that's why we're here to help. Here's a look at the best offerings for the fitness-minded Apple Watch owner.

Do you even lift, bro? If you do, Liftr is the app for you. Rather than trying to be a jack of all trades, it focuses wholly on strength training, weightlifting, and bodybuilding. Its colorful and clean interface is easy to navigate, and it comes equipped with a database of over 240 exercises, many with animations demonstrating proper form and technique. There's also an equipment inventory, so you can better understand that medieval torture device passing for a core training machine at your local gym.

Liftr's performance tracking mechanisms are varied and detailed, with a comprehensive visualization system that can break down your workout week based on factors like pounds lifted or number of sets. You can see how much time was spent on individual body parts or muscle groups and get a picture of progress over time as you make gains.

Toss in iCloud backup support, custom app icons, a rest timer, and more, and you've got a very comprehensive companion for pumping iron. A Liftr Pro subscription runs $3.99 per month, which isn't much for the serious gym rat looking to add some technological juice to their workouts.

Working out and fitness are serious business, with real impact on long-term health and quality of life. Of course, as anyone who's ever caught their own facial expression in a gym mirror during a particularly intense exercise moment can attest, it can also be pretty ridiculous. If you're looking for an app that leans into the inherent humor in the fact that we're all voluntarily putting ourselves through physical torture, Carrot Fit is the pick for you.

Under the hood, Carrot Fit does what a lot of fitness apps do: offer workout guidance, monitor goals, and track biometrics over time. However, it does all of this in a package that's heavy on sarcastic attitude, humor, and personality. Workouts get entertaining names like Mount Doom Climbs or Celebrity Face Punches, and tracking comes with a bit of a judgey, biting twist, offering up snark in response to missing workouts or not hitting targets.

It should be said that Carrot's particular brand of humor isn't for everyone, with animations and art that have drawn some criticism for potential issues with body shaming. Still, if you're up for a workout partner whose whole vibe is to give you the business and make you laugh at yourself, it's a fun and refreshing pick in a field of more straight-faced applications.

There are a lot of things a smartwatch app can do to help guide and motivate your pursuit of physical fitness, but for some folks, there's absolutely no substitute for the kind of one-on-one attention you get from a personal trainer. The makers of Future understand this and are looking to bring that kind of individualized attention together with the kind of immediacy offered by the Apple Watch as a platform.

Essentially, Future matches you with a real personal trainer who will work with you through the app to craft a workout regimen and set of goals according to your individual abilities and then work with you over time to track progress and provide motivation. Videos are viewed on a smartphone and controlled through your watch with pre-recorded guidance from your trainer. It's all highly personalized, and your trainer will shape workouts over time in accordance with your progress.

The downside is that this kind of individual attention doesn't come cheap — Future costs some $149 per month after a one-month trial. Still, that's cheaper than a lot of in-person personal training options, and if you need this kind of attention and guidance, it's a worthwhile investment.

If you're a runner or a cyclist, you're probably already familiar with Strava. Launched in 2009, the app has become one of the most popular options around for the distance-tracking set. Much of that popularity can be chalked up to its social features, which allow you to share and compare your performance with friends, workout partners, or even strangers who've simply navigated the same route.

Unfortunately, the Apple Watch version of the Strava app doesn't have the capability of incorporating all of its functionality due to the reduced interface real estate. That said, it does allow you to operate fully within a Strava ecosystem, seamlessly integrating tracking functionality with the larger smartphone platform and sparing you from having to carry your phone on runs or rides. The watch's onboard GPS also aids in pace monitoring and recording splits, feeding that information directly into the Strava smartphone app for accurate, real-time results versus your network.

It might seem like step counting only became a thing with the rise of Fitbit, but the practice as a measurement of fitness or an appropriate number of calories burned per day actually goes pretty far back. You've probably heard the idea that 10,000 steps per day is the target for baseline fitness — that's a number that was first calculated by scientists in Japan around the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. There's certainly been a lot of back-and-forth since then as to whether it all actually makes sense, but that hasn't stopped a step-counting boom with the rise of wearable tech.

There are any number of apps that'll count your steps on the Apple Watch, but usually that comes as part of a much larger package and requires actually navigating away from your face and into a different interface in order to view the totals. If what you're looking for is something simple that will allow at-a-glance access to your step totals, Pedometer++ is for you. It's pretty basic overall, but the killer feature is the ability to add a complication to your watch face to provide at-a-glance access to your step totals. Sure, tapping through to an app only takes seconds and a few finger flicks, but there's something to be said for efficiency, and Pedometer++ offers it.