1. Cardio
VO2 max will move out of gyms and labs and into medical offices, corporate workplace wellness initiatives as an objective measure of cardiovascular fitness and a broader health and longevity marker.
VO2 could be seen as the overarching health and wellbeing marker and become a defining number to determine the volume and effectiveness of aerobic exercise.
One of the key challenges of anxiousness and high stress is difficulty in shifting body fat and regulating sleep. Educating younger members in particular that training light will help them to sleep and regulate their appetite – so improving their physique – ties into a more holistic way of thinking.
Up to 80 per cent of training volume should be in the low zone area and I expect to see more classes and group exercise at that low intensity which can fuse cardiovascular gains with an additional mood stabilising impact.
Cardio can also play a role in active relaxation: a much needed recovery and decompression tool for calming people who are hypervigilant or heading towards burnout.
2. Effectiveness
People will increasingly want to know whether the service they’re receiving or the product they’re using is effective. Is the dose evidence-based? What’s the efficacy and provenance of the ingredients? What protocols are being use and why were they chosen? More evidence will be required for an increasingly discerning audience to engage with products and services. The language used by fitness professionals will need to sharpen to become more science-based and outcome-focused to meet consumer questioning.
3. Light therapy
Light therapy will have its moment. Infrared sauna is becoming a key modality for fitness operators. Red light therapy offers 55 to 65 degree ambient temperatures, with embedded photobiomodulation, which mimics cardiovascular exercise to activate all the benefits of heat, but also supports relaxation, stress management and sleep.
We’ll also see blue light devices. Blue light at the same frequencies as natural sunlight can trigger the hormone cascade that manages our circadian rhythm. We need that in the morning, so we might find gyms either deploying circadian lighting, so they’ve got brighter lights in the morning, darker in the evening, but more importantly, we’ll see the rise of consumers interested in how they get first morning light, that could mean well tech, or morning walking and running clubs.
4. Fibre
The bedrock of the gut microbiome, fibre is probably the most missing nutrient from the average household. Making fibre the hero will be the opportunity for people to go back to whole food versus the ultra-processed tsunami we’re surfing.
There’s an obsession with protein, which is valid, but clouds the judgment so people forget about fibre. We need to go back to the roots of eating food instead of post-exercise protein supplements. I think protein has had its year. It’s still relevant, but fibre needs to get back on the map.
5. Social wellness
Being with people, performing non-essential tasks, is a huge part of our pleasure. But more people are feeling lonely and isolated. The fractured workforce and remote working patterns means many young people won’t build the social bonds that Gen X and Millennials have, so will have to find new ways of finding their people. Sport is the easiest modality for dropping barriers – so we’ll start to see more social clubs, such as for running or cold water swimming. Padel is so popular because it’s a four-person game. Extending the social outreach of facilities to broader hobbies would be a logical play – for example starting chess clubs or art classes.
6. Quantified self
The quantified self will blur between medicine, medical data, lifestyle data and functional data. Every individual piece of hardware and software wants to own the customer, and at the moment the data is in silos that never quite bind together and seem to sit separately from the fitness industry. The data won’t slow down, so understanding where we sit in the ecosystem will be important this year.
The search for the data aggregator will begin. The question mark is whether the fitness industry can absorb and use that data more effectively, or sit outside of that picture. Operators will have to decide whether they want to just pretend it’s not happening, or whether they want to train their teams in wearables, lifestyle data and health data and then ensure that embeds into programming and progression.
7. Brain health
The rise in people looking to optimise their brain is running concurrently with a global neurocognitive decline. There’s a pandemic in the increasing rate of dementia and Alzheimer’s and a new generation who are interested in preventing these outcomes.
Anyone worried about their brain health should already be in a fitness facility and fitness professionals need to be able to understand brain health.
Technogym Checkup has kicked off the trend, using a cognitive test in a gym assessment for the first time and I think we’ll also see a rise in cognitive testing, reflex and neuro-cognitive testing, to include potential functional markers.
Objective measurements of the brain through EEG are becoming more accessible with companies, such as Wavi, doing brain mapping, which allow us to measure the impact of lifestyle on the brain: the role of exercise, the role of blood glucose control and increasing ranges of nootropics and adaptogens that are targeted at the brain – most notably products that are mushroom centric, such as lion’s mane.
There will also be an increased focus on the role cardiorespiratory fitness, sleep, nutrition and blood glucose control play in brain function.
Oli Patrick has 25 years’ experience as a physiologist and wellbeing specialist and is also the co-founder of both Future Practice and Pillar Wellbeing
