With AI, the best fitness apps are now able to provide personalized and adaptive workout plans that aim to achieve your goals and provide insights based on your activities and health data.
How do you know which exercises are best for your body? Or how to translate your health data into a fitness routine? So many fitness apps are turning to artificial intelligence to answer these questions. AI programs can study your data and translate it into easy-to-understand information; some use that information to create fitness plans that change on a day-to-day basis depending on how well your workout went the day before, or even your activity over the last few years.
We’ve gathered five fitness apps who use AI in a variety of ways to improve the app and experience for users. Read on to see how these apps track and use your data and whether they’re worth the cost.
Runna
- Price: US $19.99/month or $119.99/year / UK £15.99/month / AU $30/month
Want to run a marathon? Improve your running times? Or simply run longer distances? Consider Runna, the running app that offers personalized running plans to achieve your goals. In addition to running plans, Runna offers nutritional tips, running form advice, and even strength and mobility exercises. Others seek out the app for community elements, like running events, a team of running coaches you can message, and a host of discounts and offers.
How it implements AI: Runna uses AI to generate your run plan. By monitoring your intervals, tempo, and time, Runna determines your pace status after each workout. Over time, the AI program can see trends in your running results, such as whether or not you’re hitting your pace status and if you need a new pace target or workout plan to achieve your goals.
Premium plan subscribers also have access to the beta version of a new Runna AI program called Workout Insights. After you complete your workout and rate it, Workout Insights pops up with thorough feedback produced via generative AI on what you did well, where you can improve, how your workout fits with your overall fitness goals, and some motivation and encouragement.
Verdict: 4.5 stars. Read our full Runna review
PUSH
- Price: $15.99/month or $64.99/year / UK £15.99/month or £99.99/year / AU $23.49/month or $144.99/year
Build muscles quickly and efficiently with PUSH Workout & Gym Tracker. This app provides tailored strength-based workout plans for gym-goers and tracks your fitness over time, letting users know when to increase their reps or weight and providing new exercises once targets have been achieved.
How it implements AI: After filling out a questionnaire about your workout routine, access to equipment, sleep and stress levels, and which muscles you want to focus on, PUSH’s AI creates a personalized strength training routine. The workout plan is detailed in terms of reps and weights, even providing a rep timer.
The app’s AI tracks your progress over time, providing you with new suggestions for weights and reps to maximize muscle growth once it sees that you can handle certain workouts. If you can’t complete a set with a certain weight, the AI might even create a plateau breaker exercise – such as an exercise with lighter weights or fewer reps – to help you stay on track.
Verdict: Our best fitness app for strength training. Read our full PUSH review.
Strava
- Price: $11.99/month (monthly), $79.99/year + taxes (yearly), $139.99/year + taxes (family plan for four accounts) / UK £8.99/month or £54.99/year / AU $14.99/month or $99.99/year
Track your running and cycling stats with the Strava app. It doubles as a social network, letting users share their workouts and routes or even join community-based running or cycling groups. It’s a great resource to find trails – be they on or off the road – in your area.
How it implements AI: Athlete Intelligence is the name of Strava’s generative AI program. It’s designed to provide users with easier-to-understand insights based on their activity data.
Upon uploading an activity like a run or a hike to Strava, the AI program offers feedback on your activity using encouraging language, as well as some thoughts on your overall exercise and fitness journey. By examining your speed, endurance, heart rate, pace, and elevation from the past 30 days of activities, Athlete Intelligence may suggest your next activity, celebrate milestones, or note overall fitness trends.
Verdict: We rated Strava highly in our full Strava review, although it was written before the AI features were introduced. Athlete Intelligence offers nice contextual information, but after using it for a week, we said: “for now, though, there’s not a lot that the AI can tell me that my fitness tracker isn’t [telling me] already.”
AllTrails
- Price: $35.99/year / UK £35.99 / AU $35.99
AllTrails is a phenomenal resource to find trails to hike, walk, and cycle. With a subscription, users can create maps, plan trips, navigate and track their activities, and access stats. Within the community space on the app, you can suggest edits to trails, connect with others, and share trail lists.
How it implements AI: AllTrails uses AI in numerous ways. First, there’s TrailsGPT – an AI program that examines trip reports, comments, and images, and makes necessary edits to incorrect information. For instance, if a user accidentally wrote the wrong trail name, TrailsGPT would clean that up. The app also uses AI to search through photos submitted by users and pins those photos at the correct points on the trail map, so other hikers can see where certain photos were taken on the trail. Lastly, an OpenAI program creates a review summary at the top of each trail page, so you can get an overview of the feedback for each trail rather than have to read through all the reviews to get the latest updates on trail conditions or changes.
Bonus: If you’re a ChatGPT Plus Subscriber, you can access AllTrails’ chatboat called AllTrails GPT. This AI chatbot examines AllTrails’ database and answers questions users might have about trail conditions, what gear to bring for a specific trail, and more.
Verdict: Rated 4.5 stars in our AllTrails review, and the review summaries/photo pins are genuinely very useful.
Garmin Connect+
- Price: $6.99/month or $69.99/year / UK £6.99/ month or £69.99/year / AU $12/month or $120/year
Users can track their fitness activities and receive Garmin Coach training plans through Garmin’s Connect+ app. In addition to building out courses for a ride or run using the best Garmin watches, you can take advantage of animated exercises, and receive insights and suggestions based on your health stats. Friends, family, or fans can track your starting and stopping points during an activity with LiveTrack, via text alerts rather than the usual single link.
How it implements AI: Active Intelligence is the AI program that Connect+ uses to offer individualized fitness insights and suggestions throughout your day based on your health and overall activity data. These suggestions appear as small snippet-like paragraphs, created by generative AI, and even some graphs and charts.
Some users have noted that Active Intelligence doesn’t really differ from the insights that Garmin watches already provide and many have criticized the occasionally-redundant platitudes it offers, but perhaps this will change over time. Garmin Coach also utilizes AI to create workout plans for users and adapt those plans when necessary.
Verdict: Early users have not been kind, as the backlash shows.
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