What Is Fitness Software?

Alesia Prytulenets

September 28, 2021 • 4 min

Discover the types of fitness software and get our tips on how to choose the appropriate one.

Due to the pandemic of 2020 personal health care all around the globe is coming to a completely different level, where preventative care, healthy nutrition and a proper fitness system are the main components. At the same time, people are still afraid of the big number of visitors in gyms, and lots of them prefer to cancel their gym membership or workout from home. That's where fitness software programs can help. What are the fitness center software programs types and how to choose the appropriate one, let’s figure it out in our new article.

Types of Sports Software Solutions

There are two types of software for fitness: gyms software and personal training software. Gym management software such as Coast, Zen Planner and Mindbody helps to increase the efficiency of running a sport centre. This is a CRM-like softwarefor gyms which optimizes costs, assigns tasks to employees, manages inventory, processes payments, composes personal schedules and controls the quality of personal training.

Personal training applications are proposed by gyms to its visitors to help them to achieve the needed results, and depending on the goal they fall into several categories:

• workout and exercise apps - show their users what exercises to do for each part of the body and how to do them properly. Such a software in an ideal replacement for fitness center activities. Here you can find personal trainer apps like 6 Week Training, which create custom tailored complex of exercises with videos, 3D models and detailed explanation; logbook apps, which create your training journal with personal statistics and info about each training; and workout fitness apps that pair with devices and display all data about training duration and quality as well as your health indicators;
• nutrition apps - help their users to control weight and increase the quality of nutrition by counting calories and displaying the number of fats, proteins and carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals in each portion of food. Some of them like HealthyOut even have a barcode scanner, count the daily amount of water and coffee consumed and suggest healthy recipes and shopping lists;
• activity tracking apps - count the number of steps or duration of simple activities such as jogging or bike using geolocation as well as the quality of sleep in order to help people who don’t visit sport centres to keep fit. This software is also ideal for fitness studio visitors as it helps them to workout properly.

Trends in Fitness App Development

Due to the high demand and competition in the sector, companies are constantly trying to improve the user experience and enrich the range of options offered. Among the numerous features of the new software for fitness business the main are personalisation, usability and security, which altogether contribute to better user engagement and retention.

The first place here takes personalisation. Apps like FitnessBuilder Plus and iWOD Fitness allow you to create a personal account, choose some preset exercises or compose a bunch of new exercises on a certain part of the body, set goals and notifications, and even track statistics on the results achieved. Plus, you can integrate your gym management app with other services like counting calories apps or fitness trackers, which saves your time and improves app usability.

High level of gamification like in Charity Miles app helps to retain user interest, while fitness live chats and streaming among the app users give them the place where they can share their experience and get recognition. If we speak about gym membership software, then sophisticated membership management, easy booking and scheduling and a wide range of marketing and accounting tools have already become a basic set of its features. Finally, a high level of security in data storing and verification is a special concern of every fitness app developer in 2023.

How to Choose One?

First of all, gyms and fitness centres should estimate the necessity of gym management and other related scheduling software for gyms: count the number of visitors, compare the complexity of clients’ and their trainers’ schedule, and include personal specialisation and peculiarities in the calculation.

After the right fitness management software is set, choose additional personal training applications that will fit your clients’ workout programs. Make sure that the chosen software is both employee and client oriented: it should be user-friendly, work with different tracking devices and be highly accessible by all visitors of your fitness centre. For that reason, a mobile version of the app is a must.  

Further, diverse and secure statistics data can be a powerful tool to give your clients achievements and progress visualization. And finally comes the question how much does it cost to develop a fitness application, where you also have several options:

• paid apps: this fitness mobile app development model implies that clients pay only once and get access to all the functionality in your app for unlimited period of time;
• freemium apps: the core functionality is free, but if clients want to get advanced features, they need to subscribe to a premium version;
• apps with in-app purchases: such apps make money by offering accompanying virtual goods inside the app like personalized training, exercises or diet plans;
• apps with ads: these apps are free, but money is earned by placing ads inside in the form of pop-ups, banners and videos, which makes the user experience worse.

The range of possible fitness app development solutions is really wide, so in order to sum up all the factors and choose the best health and fitness app development tool, it’s good to arrange a short voting among the personnel and visitors of your gym. It's good if they can brainstorm to choose the best-fitting app ideas. And if you want to create a super fitness experience for your customers or get a free specialist consultation, contact us and we will be happy to help you.