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Hello, I'm Thomas Olson, associate professor of medicine in the department of cardiovascular medicine at Mayo Clinic. Thank you for being with me today as I discuss exercise apps, their benefits, and how we can use them to maximize those benefits.
Before I get into the details of that, I wanted to first start off with describing a broad spectrum of the mobile app ecosystem from a healthcare perspective. We often think of utilization of smartphone apps, or apps that go on our tablets, from the perspective of preventing an illness or disease from occurring or managing that illness or disease. Now, these two broad categories can then be subdivided into apps that provide health care specific information; maybe they provide professional or supported care; maybe they're used more from a social interaction perspective; or maybe they're for us independently to use on our own.
Within each of these categories, then, we have very specific apps that can help us accomplish those goals. Oftentimes, these apps may cross over into multiple categories. For today's discussion, I'm going to be talking more specifically about exercise and fitness apps. In this category, there are literally hundreds of apps available for us to download onto our smart devices. This data from Sensor Tower was published in March of 2002, which shows the top 10 health and fitness apps downloaded in the United States.
Now, many of these apps are familiar to us; maybe we use them, our friends and family use them—things like MyFitnessPal, or Fitbit, or FitnessCoach. Many of these apps fall on a broad spectrum of cost as well, something that we have to consider when choosing the app that we're going to use. Some are free to download, and all of the content in that app is free to access. To the other end of the spectrum, where there may be a cost to download and a cost to access the content that's in the app; some are a one-time cost, and some require monthly or yearly subscription fees.
So, in that context, I want to talk about the benefits of utilizing these smartphone apps and how we might get the most benefit from them. So, when thinking about choosing an app to help us guide us in our exercise and fitness endeavors, we want to think about qualities that would make the app successful in helping us ultimately change a behavior. Some of the things that we think about are predisposing factors: Does the app provide some sort of questionnaire or survey that assesses our knowledge, or our attitudes, or values towards the behavior that we're trying to change? Are there enabling factors—things that the app might do to teach a skill or provide a service—or does the app even track the behavior that we're trying to change? And then, are there reinforcing factors? Does the app provide access to a social network of individuals who are in a similar position, also trying to change that behavior? Does it provide encouragement? Some apps even provide coaching.
So, do these apps work? What's the benefit? Well, there was a recent systematic review and meta-analysis that was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine just this year, in 2020. The systematic review looked at 35 unique studies examining the use of smartphone apps and activity trackers to improve an individual's physical activity. Of these 35 unique apps, there was a wide range of interventions that were used, ranging from two weeks to 40 weeks. All of the participants that engaged in these studies were otherwise healthy adults without any chronic disease; their ages ranged from 18 to 65; and in total, there were about 7,500 participants, but only about a quarter of those participants were women.
When taking all these studies and looking at the data that the studies provided, we can conduct what's called a meta-analysis, where we look at the overall benefit of these apps. And what this review found was that interventions that use a contemporary smartphone application and/or physical activity tracker are effective at promoting and increasing physical activity.
So then, how do we use these apps to get the most benefit out of them? One thing that we need to think about are the goals that we're trying to accomplish. So we can use the app to set these goals and then track our progress towards the goal. Those goals, when thinking about exercise and fitness, we often use something called the F.I.T. principle, which stands for frequency, intensity, and time. So, using the app to track how often we're engaging in the exercise behaviors, what the intensity of that exercise is, and then how much time we're spending during each individual exercise session. We can also add an extra T to the end of this F.I.T. principle and track the type of exercise that we're engaging in—whether it's strength or resistance training or aerobic-based exercise—and whether we're using a treadmill, a cycle, or an elliptical trainer. We can use these apps to find new exercises or new workout ideas to help us stimulate the change that we're trying to accomplish. We can use the apps to get advice, access to health coaches or personal trainers; we can use them to seek out additional education and fitness tips; we can also use them to come up with new ways of thinking about the goals that we've set, or maybe a different outlook on the progression that we've made towards our goals—are we moving too fast or too slowly in our efforts to reach our goals? And importantly, these apps can provide extrinsic motivation and help us along the way. [Music]
So, as I leave today, I want to provide you with a few brief points as take-home messages. Now, as I mentioned early on in our conversation, there are a lot of apps available on the market today, and there really isn't a one-size-fits-all. So it's important that we find an overall strategy that works for us individually, and then be consistent with that strategy. And don't be afraid of changing to a different app; the app, device, gadget market is constantly evolving. So, just because we found an app that works for us now doesn't necessarily mean there might—there might not be a better app in the future. Apps can provide immediate feedback, which is fantastic, but it's important to keep our focus on the long-term goal that we're trying to accomplish, and then continue to educate yourself on ways to achieve your goals; learn more and build awareness about your current habits; utilize the health coaches, the fitness specialists, and the articles to help you reach your ultimate fitness goals.
So I appreciate your time today, and thank you.