Social Fitness Apps to Compete with Your Friends
One of the most effective ways to exercise more is to get social support, and often that means introducing some friendly competition to your exercise goals. Not everything has to be a competition, but as the saying goes, a little competition never hurt anyone.
Fitness competitions are an ancient tradition, so it’s no surprise we find them in our modern apps. Competition is one of the core elements of Pantheon, so we thought we’d share some of our favorite apps for competing with your friends, fitness style.
Pantheon
Pantheon is a social fitness app built to help teams get fit together. We do things a little different. Rather than give you a step goal and award whoever gets the most steps, Pantheon recognizes each person based on their level of effort. Pantheon creates objectives based on your activity, exercise, meditation, and ability to cooperate with team members.
How does Pantheon work?
Import activity from your favorite fitness apps
Log workouts, meditations, and daily movement
Complete challenges alone or with teammates
Cooperate or compete with your team
Pantheon reads all your data from Apple Watch, Google Fit, Fitbit, and a host of other apps. As you complete workouts, meditations, or other wellness activities, Pantheon will recognize your accomplishments and allow you to compare or cooperate with teammates. Learn more about Pantheon.
Pantheon likes to play with others, so if you’re looking for additional ways to compete with your friends, here are some other fun apps we recommend.
1. Nike Run Club
The Nike Run Club is a run tracker created by Nike to take your running experience to the next level. Nike has guided runs from running coaches to help you pace yourself or learn new styles of running.
The competition comes in the form of a Leaderboard where you can see which of your friends is racking up the most miles. Your friends will be notified when you go on a run - which allows them to cheer you on, or let’s them know that you’re picking up miles and they need to catch up.
If you want to compete against a broader community, Nike Run Club also includes Challenges. By joining a Challenge, you will be placed into a global leaderboard for that Challenge, where you can see how much distance runners around the world are running.
Select cities have official Nike Run Clubs, which you can find in the app. These Clubs allow you to meet up with runners for special events.
You can download the Nike Run Club app from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store.
2. Strava
Designed mostly for runners and cyclists, Strava tracks running and cycling. But that’s not the real draw. Strava gives its users the ability to post routes (called Segments) for other members of the Strava community to compete on. Whoever can complete a Segment the fastest becomes the King of that Segment. This leads to hyper- intense competition for runners and cyclists in different geographies as people work to dethrone each other.
Strava also includes community tools for people to connect and plan rides with. So if you are looking to make new friends, you can connect with local cycling communities.
You can download Strava from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store.
3. Pokémon Go
Okay, so Pokémon Go technically isn’t a fitness app, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use it as a fun way to use competition to get more exercise. If walking for it’s own sake is boring to you, you can use the excuse of finding new Pokémon and hatching eggs to get you to walk more. In fact, researches found Pokémon Go led players to walk 25% more than they did before playing the game . And while you’re not really competing with friends on who can do the most pushups, you can still compete with them on Pokémon Go-based objectives, like filling your Pokedex or becoming a Gym Leader (this is an especially effective way to get more outdoor time with kids).
Pokémon Go is available on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
Want more reviews on the latest fitness tech and gear? Check out our Gear Reviews section to learn more about the tech, toys, and apps that we use to stay healthy and fit.