I just read an article from a fitness magazine that looked at the top ‘trends’ in fitness and wellness for 2024. Let’s stop at the word ‘trend’ for a second. Since when has being healthy i.e. on the fitness end of the above spectrum, been ‘trendy’. If it’s trendy now, will it possibly go out of fashion in the future? I hope not.
Rant aside, let’s look into the article.
Fitness and wellness are growing priorities for many. According to Lululemon’s 2023 Global Wellbeing Report, 67% of people place wellbeing as a top priority, but only 12% say their wellbeing is where it should be.
How will consumers try to narrow the gap between their fitness goals and their current reality?
The article looks at:
Connected fitness e.g. The Mirror (a $500 million flop for Lululemon), Peloton, Tonal. None seem to have a particularly bright outlook despite celebrity endorsement.
Wearables e.g. Apple Watch, WHOOP, Oura ring, Fitbit etc. Data is great but is a lagging indicator of the things you actually do to improve your health.
Weight Loss Drugs I’m not qualified to have a strong opinion on whether these work or not but a lot of the commercials I see on TV appear to include some sort ‘when included with exercise’ message in small print
Virtual Reality still in its infancy; I imagine will follow a similar trajectory to ‘connected fitness’
And In Person fitness, especially Strength Training, Functional Training and Pilates, the first two being where we come in.
A 2023 annual report from IHRSA says “consumers have gained a better understanding about the correlation between physical activity and better mental and physical health and well-being, which has led to a resurgence in people connecting and engaging in-person at health clubs and studios around the world” (post pandemic).
There’s no denying, for most of the members that walk through the doors of JCFit, one of the things that led them to us was the accountability and fun working out with others brings i.e. a sense of community (that was so lacking during the pandemic and you don’t get to the same extent with connected and virtual. The other main one is they don’t have to think about what they are going to do when they get to the gym, we have it all planned out for them.
At its core, JCFit focuses on strength and conditioning through functional fitness. So we’ve got the first two ‘trends’ covered. We can loosely define functional fitness as being good across the broad spectrum of 10 General Physical Skills (you’ll notice Strength is one of them): cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, speed, coordination, agility, balance and accuracy.
You are as fit as you are competent in each of these 10 skills. A regimen develops fitness to the extent that it improves each of these 10 skills and every day our programming is designed to improve at least one, and often multiple, of these.
Strength training in particular is growing in popularity with Gen Z for 2 main reasons according to Fabrizio Cecchinelli at Technogym: social media and science. Strength training’s photogenic nature makes for aesthetically pleasing posts (strength training produces the ‘show’ muscles, the other 9 skills produce the ‘go’ muscles) and the science behind strength training has also propelled workouts, as a search on PubMed, the National Institute of Health’s database of biotechnology information, revealed that in the last decade, the number of searches for scientific information related to the benefits of strength training increased almost fourfold.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do strength training if you aren’t Gen Z. Whether you are 9 or 99, everyone benefits from lifting weight and in a future post, we’ll look into why. We will analyze the other 9 General Physical Skills in a series of posts to see how they impact us in our everyday lives and/or as we play sports.
If you are curious about how we do things at JCFit to stay ‘trendy’, book a No Sweat Intro and let’s chat about your goals and how we can help you.
