Summer is in full swing given this past weeks’ heat wave and I’ve been thinking about the tech that I use in everyday life to help me get outside more.

Here are my favorite apps and tools that I use alongside the iPhone and Apple Watch to get outside more, especially during the warmer months.

This is one of the first apps I look at in the morning. Athlytic turns your Apple Watch into a more powerful fitness device.

Features like recovery status, battery, step counters and training load are the standouts for me.

I use the Apple Watch Ultra 2 to track sleep. Athlytic will take an Heart Rate Variability (HRV) reading to assist in its calculation for “recovery”.

I have to watch this and training load carefully due to chronic health conditions. Over training can and has set me back in the past and I am more aware of that now that I have these tools at my disposal.

Slow and steady over the long term is the path that I am taking with my fitness. I want to still be able to move around in similar ways 30 and 40 years down the line.

Athlytic is a subscription app for the reasonable price of $29.99/year.

I use this app every time I go for a mountain bike ride.

It has more features than I know what to do with, but it tracks GPS, heart rate and is effectively a beefed up version of the regular Apple Fitness app on the watch.

Since I have mobile data on my Apple Watch, this lets me leave the phone behind and not get lost in the woods when I inevitable take a wrong turn on the bike.

You can create and export maps to share them with other services, like Strava.

The app also syncs with Strava and can automatically upload your runs, rides, kayaks, whatever into Strava when you are done.

The app is a one time pay to use, currently $8.99 USD, with a tip system if you want to support the developer. I highly recommend if you have the means and you use the app to do so.

I love supporting apps that aren’t subscriptions.

Apple Health has a wealth of information, more than most people, including me, will ever utilize.

One specific feature that I like is combined with the Apple Watch and it is called “Time in Daylight”.

The benefits of morning sunlight and being outside are too numerous to count at this point and I feel like if you are interested in health and fitness at all, you understand this basic and free concept.

Lately I have been trying to get outside more, specifically in the morning, right after waking.

I wake up, feed the dog, and off we go on a morning walk, usually netting me 15-20 minutes of sunlight first thing in the morning.

Living in New England there are far too many days in the winter months where seeing the sun is next to impossible, especially in the mornings.

My time has grown exponentially as the temps have warmed up.

And the best part is, it is totally free if you have an Apple Watch.

Health and fitness tech has come a long way in recent years, but it is still just one piece of the puzzle.

There are plenty of days where the data says I’m basically dead and my body feels fine, so I workout anyway.

The opposite is true as well, last week I had a 100% recovery and spent the entire day home from work in bed feeling like absolute garbage.

Just keep that in mind, but get out there and enjoy the summer!

A few weeks ago I detailed all of the other things I use within the Apple Ecosystem as well.

The price at the end was a bit staggering, but a fun time nonetheless.

Check it out and let me know what your favorites are!

Talk next week!