PHYSICAL FITNESS: TRENDS and FADS
We all know that fitness is the desirable state of health, allowing a higher quality of life. We exercise to enhance strength, flexibility, endurance, balance and coordination. We like to feel that the choices we make concerning how we exercise are based on the most up to date material provided by those in the know. The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) has provided us with an annual survey of world-wide fitness trends for the past 13 years. It draws on a considerable number of responses to its questionnaire from fitness professionals everywhere. The collated results help indicate fitness trends for the year to come.
It distinguishes between TRENDS-a general development or change in a situation or in the way that people are behaving-and FADS-a fashion that is taken up with great enthusiasm for a brief period. The light-headed trainer will slavishly commit to whatever fad is introduced through heavily-marketed hype about some catchy named ‘new’ class, which uses variations of long-existing exercise forms. The wise exerciser will respond critically to the trends.
The ACSM survey is a useful guide to what the fitness industry perceives as the current ranking of exercise trends, and an introduction to the top eight will help you assess where your focus might lie during the coming year’s exercise schedules. With the lock-downs as a result of the pandemic, the survey here goes back to 2019-20, before the huge disruptions in access to gyms.
Ranked at no. 1 is Wearable Technology. Growing in popularity is the use of personal accessories that merge fitness and technology. Smart watches and devices that monitor heart rates, endurance levels, track calories expended, effort outputs, and provide GPS info. The market is expanding rapidly with these personal aids to fitness.
No.2 is Group Training. Any group larger than five participants, led and guided by a professional instructor, will draw participants. The social factor of working with fellow-sufferers is a powerful incentive, with more fun being shared with a group than found in training alone. More work is done, under the constant instruction of the group training instructor (GEI), than the wandering about on one’s own on the weights floor, looking for equipment, from exercise to exercise.
A major trend, in this area, has been the move from I hour classes to the shorter, more abbreviated 45 or 30-minute group classes, adding greater intensity to workouts, with shorter rest breaks. If you practise the luxury of loitering on the gym floor for more than an hour, you are so laid-back, lazy and retro!
No.3 is High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). Popular since 2014, this form of training involves repeated short bursts of high-intensity exercise (90% of max. H.R.), followed by short periods of rest and recovery. More strenuous than most forms of training, HIIT helps create strength and stamina and challenges the trainer to push to higher levels of effort, usually in the shorter, 30 minute sessions.
No.4. Rising from 2017’s position 11, and 2018’s ninth position, Older Adults is a sure-fire contender for high rankings. More mature adults are living longer, working longer and taking care of their physical profiles by remaining healthy and physically and mentally active. To maintain bone density and resist age-related muscle loss (sarcopenia), lower risks of cardiovascular disease, dementia and certain cancers, and to improve balance and coordination, exercise is the panacea for the mature.
No.5 is Bodyweight Training. Using combinations of variable resistance, bodyweight training and neuro-motor movements, encouraging multiple planes of movement, this type of program uses one’s own bodyweight as the training modality. Minimum equipment is necessary and this trend, appearing first in 2013, has appeared in the top five since then.
No.6 trend is Employing Certified Fitness Professionals. Fully accredited and educated professionals who have been trained to supervise others safely are a priority in well-run businesses. Too many self-taught amateurs open gyms in their garages, putting their unsuspecting clients at risk because of their shared-ignorance.
No.7 is one of the earliest forms of exercise, at least 3000 years in the running, outpacing all the Zumba and Kick-boxing fads that have arrived, then faded. Yoga persists. Health Clubs continue to recognise the importance of this form of self-controlled physical exercise that increases strength, enhances flexibility and balance, and helps one centre emotionally, while stress is controlled.
No.8 Personal Training. These are services by trained professionals, such as fitness testing, goal-setting and individualised, supervised exercise programs to clients prepared to pay for services. Now, in the IT age, online access to these services is also available.
It should be noted that a number of forms of exercise include cross-over blends of the above basics, so that even though categories such as walking/jogging/running, Pilates, Water Exercise, Children’s classes, circuit-training, boot-camp-style training, kickboxing and mixed martial arts don’t make it to the top 20 trends, these and other possibilities still appear, alive and relevant, in various parts of the exercising world, and have their role to play in adding to improved physical fitness and better all-round health in 2021.