The Benefits and Harms of Fitness Apps
Keeping a healthy lifestyle is crucial. No one is against being fit and healthy, but not everyone is ready to put in the effort necessary to achieve this goal. We have seen many new individuals or newcomers exercising hard for a few months, then falling behind. Many individuals may find it very difficult to start a healthy lifestyle through exercising and a balanced diet. Similarly, many find it difficult to maintain it for a long time.
Therefore, if you’re having trouble staying on track with your exercise regimen, an exercise tracker app may be able to assist you in this. Depending on the user’s requirements, various health applications are available, each offering something unique.
What are the pros and cons of fitness apps? This article will discuss the major pros and cons of utilizing these applications and how it helps shape a healthy lifestyle in detail.
Benefits of Using Fitness Apps
1. Getting Personalized Health Coaching is Easy
Technology such as smartphones has now made a living a lot simpler. There is no longer any need to look for personal trainers, health coaches, or exercise classes. Personal health coaches are available on certain applications for a reasonable fee. The coach assists you in reaching your fitness objectives while also educating you on the many fitness activities and nutrition options available to you.
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The coolest thing is that you won’t have to spend a lot of time travelling to get such services. All that is required is that you download the app and begin a workout regimen.
2. Real-time Progress Monitoring is Possible
You can easily keep track of all your exercise and health improvements through smartphone fitness applications with just one click. Fitness tracking apps allow you to enter all of your health information and receive updates on your progress. For example, you may keep track of your blood glucose and blood pressure readings easily. Thus, this allows you to monitor all your health data in one place.
3. Free Fitness and Health Tips from Experts
Most of the applications offer health and fitness advice and training instructions to help you achieve your desired health objectives. Moreover, you may also receive free training or exercise ideas to help you organize your training program conveniently.
4. Balanced Diet Monitoring
Weight watchers or those seeking to gain weight may calculate the nutritional intake after each meal through these healthy lifestyle apps. Usually, they use your food intake data to determine your meal’s calorie, carbohydrate, protein, and fat content. This way, you may avoid unhealthy meals.
Are Fitness Apps Dangerous?
Those concerned about the digital privacies and technological advancements mostly ask, what are some potential risks associated with health apps? The answer is described in the following section in detail:
1. Poor GPS Connectivity Generates Inaccurate Data
Apps that monitor and compare users’ running routes create errors and compute pathways through GPS that vary from the user’s actual route. Consequently, few people continue to use fitness applications that incorrectly measure and compute routes since these errors immediately affect calorie burn and other metrics.
2. Affect Battery Life (Fast Draining)
Exercise tracker apps demand a great deal of battery power to monitor users’ activities. Jogging with a smartphone that counts steps or monitors heart rate through a wearable gadget requires a fully charged battery.
After using these applications for a while, many users report battery depletion. Even if it is customary to exercise for one or two hours, the applications used for this purpose often deplete the battery of mobile devices much more rapidly.
3. Lack of Automation and Complicated Data Entry
Fitness apps require users to track their daily calorie intake. However, most fitness applications lack automated capabilities that enable users to enter the necessary data quickly.
Longer times for recording food intake data are difficult to envisage. As a result, many users lose patience and give up on these applications after a month or two of usage.
4. Privacy Dangers
Fitness tracking apps may harm your digital privacy as most open source available apps are not secure and may leak data. Just like other businesses, fitness app developers have had data breaches. The 2018 hack of UnderArmour’sMyFitnessPal was the biggest ever. It exposed over 150 million users’ usernames, passwords, and email addresses. In addition to exposing location data, hackers usually target data that may be readily monetized (such as credit card numbers).
Downsize the Harmful Impact of Fitness apps
Following are the essential safety measures to avoid the harmful impacts of fitness apps:
- You should read the privacy policy in the first place. Don’t put data into an app unless it explicitly states what data it shares and with whom. If this is not something you are comfortable with, look for another app.
- Validate your privacy settings on your device. Because it is vital to prohibit the app from sharing your data, the most private approach is to prevent it from gathering data in the first place.
- Many of these applications gather more data than is required to perform their primary purpose. Provide only necessary data.
- Question, how a fitness app will utilize your data? Send them an email and inquire.
- For gaining high-profile privacy, it is recommended to download a VPNfor accessing your fitness applications. There are many available options for selecting an appropriate VPN service for this purpose; however, among them, VeePN is the best suited! You can use its VPN for google chrome extension to hide your real identity. It can effectively be utilized to secure your private data from being tracked or stolen.
To sum up, fitness and health applications may help you remain motivated and monitor your progress. But you shouldn’t risk your digital health for your physical health. It’s essential to assure that the applications you download may not compromise your privacy.
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The Benefits and Harms of Fitness Apps