As an athlete, balancing the stresses of everyday life and the pressures of sport can often be overwhelming, leading to anxiety and poor mental health.
Balancing sports with life is tricky. The ISNation team is made up of former athletes, who often struggled to strike this equilibrium. With the limited selection of tools around us, many of us faced burnt out, leading to subpar performance.
As an athlete, you need to be able to prevent burnout to ensure you are performing at your best and maintaining good mental health. Luckily, nowadays, you can download various apps to help create the balance you need to thrive as an athlete.
For this list, we tested various health apps, offsetting their features and performance against their suitability for sporting professionals in creating a sport-life balance. Here's a list of 10 must-have apps for athletes.
9 Must-Have Apps for Athletes
- Prehab
- Apple Fitness
- Google Fit
- Smiling Mind
- ISNation
- Headspace
- Calm
- Strava
- MyFitnessPal
What Makes a Good App for Athletes?
Here are the metrics and qualities we used to find and curate apps to be on this list.
Straightforward to use: Apps can often be confusing to navigate, with complex user interfaces that make it difficult for users to find what they are looking for. A good app for athletes must be easy to navigate, with clear signposts that tell users how to use the app and where to look for certain features. In short, these apps must be straightforward to use.
Range of exercises: Apps for athletes must have various features or exercises that all positively contribute to building proper sports-life balance. These apps must be built with quality to build good habits for athletes.
Targeted: While some apps effectively target a broad range of audiences, others target specific areas, such as mental health and fitness. Good apps know their audiences and can target them with the right tools.
Affordable: The best sporting apps for athletes offer a range of options for purchasing subscriptions - providing users with the right tools (depending on their requirements) without breaking the bank.
Each app listed below was evaluated for its performance and functionality in targeting its intended audience and how well it effectively enhances the sport-life balance for athletes by complementing other applications. Considering this, the apps listed below can be used together to help athletes achieve an optimal balance in sports and life.
The Best Apps for Athletes in a Nutshell
Standout feature | Pricing (monthly) | Best for | |
Prehab | Sports rehabilitation exercises | $49.99/ month. | Physical Therapy |
Apple Fitness | Smooth functionality with Apple devices. | $9.99/ month | General Fitness Apple users |
Google Fit | Fitness hub for other sports apps | Free | General Fitness Android users |
Smiling Mind | Evidence-backed mental fitness activities | Free | Mental Fitness |
ISNation | Professional-grade courses and top-tier coaching. | $8.99/ month | Athlete Mental Fitness |
Headspace | Generous variety of well-being and meditation exercises | $12.99/ month | Meditation for Beginners |
Calm | In-depth meditation exercises, and world-class masterclasses | $14.99/month | Meditation for Experienced Users |
Strava | Social functionality with fitness data sharing | $11.99/month | Social Fitness |
MyFitnessPal | Record nutrition with barcode scanning | $19.99/month | Nutrition Tracking |
Prehab - The Best App for Physical Therapy
Prehab is a physical therapy and fitness app that provides a range of fitness programs and online workouts for injury prevention and pain relief through education and preventative rehabilitation. The app, available on the Apple App Store and Google Play, was launched by leading doctors and physical therapy coaches to improve bodily wellness.
The best physical therapy app, Prehab, allows you to create a tailor-made plan consisting of detailed daily exercise instructions that build healthy habits in sports rehabilitation. The app also allows you to track your goals and deliver the results you need to stay fit and healthy during intense training routines.
Apple Fitness - The Best Apple App for General Fitness
You need to maintain a high fitness level to facilitate high performance as an athlete. Apple Fitness is an excellent entry-level app with over 10 workout types for general fitness improvement. Offering workouts such as HIT Training, Yoga, and meditation, Apple Fitness provides an assorted mix of exercises to suit all fitness levels.
The app's straightforward functionality with Apple devices like the iPhone and Apple Watch also adds value, offering real-time metrics on the go to power your workouts. Custom workouts can be created in the app, which offers personalized recommendations based on your preferences. Apple Fitness is easily recommendable as one of the best apps for general fitness due to its ease of use and seamless integration with Apple devices; however, if you are not part of the Apple Ecosystem, you may have to look elsewhere.
Download here
Google Fit: The Best Android App for General Fitness
Google Fit is Android's answer to Apple Fitness. On first inspection, you may mistake Google Fit for a run-of-the-mill fitness app that tracks basic metrics such as the number of steps taken and your heart rate. However, Google's take on a fitness app is much more than that.
As a hub for other fitness and sports apps, Google Fit takes metrics from compatible apps such as Pokémon Go and MyFitnessPal. It turns them into measurable fitness data in the form of Move Minutes and Heart Points metrics. In collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the American Heart Association (AHA), Google developed these metrics to improve fitness, acting as easy-to-understand data for better health outcomes.
Essentially, Google Fit is a central hub for various fitness apps, allowing you to engage in your preferred workouts—such as swimming or cycling—and receive measurable insights into your activity. This enables you to set goals all within one unified platform. Google Fit also operates on IOS platforms, making it far more accessible than competitors such as Apple Fitness.
Smiling Mind - Best Free Mental Fitness & Meditation App
Mental fitness is defined as maintaining mental awareness and positive well-being. Built on this concept, Smiling Mind is an app that seeks to develop mental fitness skills, using evidence-backed content to train mental fitness across various age groups and levels.
Featuring over 700 meditations and lessons backed by psychologists, Smiling Mind aims to build positive mental health and well-being habits for its users. As an athlete, developing mental fitness is just as important as physical wellness.
Smiling mind can help you manage the rollercoaster of balancing life and sport, building the mental resilience you need to thrive as an athlete in a busy world. It is also free, making it one of the best-value mental health apps on the market, especially for athletes.
ISNation - Best Athlete Mental Fitness App
ISNation is a sports platform and mental health app combined into one. By offering athletes, coaches, and parents the tools they need through professional-grade courses and top-tier coaching, whether through meditation exercises or sport-specific content, ISNation is building a dedicated platform to improving the well-being of athletes globally.
Backed by internationally recognized athletes, coaches, and clubs, ISNation is building a community that is cultivating a move toward a healthier, more positive, and endurable sports culture for future generations, ensuring the well-being and growth of athletes.
ISnation offers free and premium subscription models, with the latter offering a range of exclusive materials such as sports mastery courses, wellness resources, exclusive online seminars, and more. For $7.66 a month, athletes can access world-class mental health sports content far below the market average.
Calm- Best Meditation App for Experienced Users
One of the major players in the meditation app market, Calm is known for its relaxing and soothing user interface, in-depth meditation exercises, and world-class masterclasses for better well-being. Calm is popular among more experienced meditation users who want lengthy guided meditation sessions.
Featuring a variety of exercises, such as sleep stories and taught meditations led by celebrities such as Jay Shetty and Cillian Murphy, and even sports-focused mental fitness from LeBron James, Calm is an extensive meditation and wellbeing app that has seen notable success in reducing stress by inciting 'calm.'
Calm is one of the premium options on the market, with expensive subscription fees. However, the app itself does offer discounts on annual signups.
Headspace - Best Meditation App for Beginners
Another heavyweight in the meditation and wellbeing technology space, Headspace is similar to Calm in that it offers a range of meditation and wellbeing exercises curated by professionals.
While Calm offers long-form exercises, Headspace caters to the beginner with a range of short, easy-to-pick-up meditations. With courses designed specifically for novices, users can learn the basics of meditation in just a few minutes a day.
Headspace offers a more generous variety of well-being and meditation exercises than Calm, with four dedicated sections to sleep, meditation, movement, and music. Each area has a vast library of different activities. For example, the app's sleep section contains sleep casts, music, wind-down meditation, and other tools for better sleep.
Headspace and Calm are excellent tools for athletes to develop healthy well-being habits for a better sport-life balance.
MyFitnessPal - Nutrition Tracking App
As an athlete, MyFitnessPal is one of those essential apps you can't do without. The market's most recognizable nutrition-tracking app, MyFitnessPal, was launched two decades ago.
Over the last twenty years, it has eliminated the guesswork and time involved in manually counting calories, saving athletes and general fitness goers thousands of hours in tracking their nutrition.
MyFitnessPal allows you to effortlessly record everything you eat daily, supported by a food database that has logged approximately 14 million foods. With a simple scan of the back of a product barcode, the MyFitnessPal app will instantly tell you its nutritional value, enabling you to track calories/macros and create tailored food plans to meet your needs.
As an athlete, it is important to fuel your body properly. MyFitnessPal can help you achieve these nutritional goals while removing the pressure of keeping track manually, enabling you to spend time on what truly matters in life.
Strava - Social Fitness App
Strava is a fitness-tracking app that tracks workouts using GPS technology. The app includes over 30 sports for tracking. It enables users to share their achievements and personal bests with friends, which adds a social element to fitness tracking and helps build a supportive community.
Strava uses AI to turn completed workouts into actionable insights, allowing users to train smarter. Its dedicated training log tracks progress and suggests recommended routes based on preferences, and user data is collected for added functionality.
Strava is a great app for general fitness. It tracks various exercises, such as running and cycling, perfectly complementing regular sporting activity for improved performance. Its added social functionality takes these elements a step further, allowing you to build a supportive community around your fitness and create a positive wellness environment. It also offers free and premium options with good accessibility.
The Best Apps for Athletes Should Be Used Together
Each app highlighted in this article can be used independently by an athlete to achieve specific goals. However, when used together, these apps become powerful tools that help athletes establish the balance between sports and life that many strive for but often find difficult to achieve.
Whether you are an avid user of one of the above apps or it's your first time, give them a try to better balance your sporting life.