Fitness Goes Social

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There's a plethora of fitness apps out there today, and many of them have a social aspect to them. After all, it can be motivating to see see what your friends are doing to stay healthy and fit. Do you ever wonder how that super athletic friend stays in great shape? Follow them on a fitness app and find out!

Many of these apps allow for challenges and competitions between you and your friends as well, whether it be who gets the most steps, runs the furthest, or bikes the longest distance, etc. In addition, you can often earn some digital bling like badges, virtual trophies, etc. to commemorate your achievements.

Garmin Connect is probably the one I use most often. I use a Garmin Fenix smartwatch to track my fitness activities and it automatically syncs my activities to my Garmin Connect account. I think the mobile app could still use a little work, especially on the strength training side of things. It's kind of odd that it limits you to 1,000 connections as well. But overall, I do like it. I do some random challenges with friends and I like tracking my performance history and PRs.

Strava is a popular app which I use fairly regularly. One of nice features that they have is their segment maps. I tend to travel a lot, and it's a useful tool to find areas where others run. Usually these are areas where I'm not going to spend a lot of time waiting for traffic and stop lights.

TrailForks is probably one of the better apps for finding mountain bike trails and it does have some social features to it... but honestly, I haven't used it for social networking at all. I use it to find trails and and sync my rides to it from my Garmin account.

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