Fashionable Fitness for 2019 – What’s on the List? (Part 1 of 2)

American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) have recently released their ‘2019 Trends in Health and Fitness’. The Worldwide Survey of Fitness Trends surveyed more than 2,000 health and fitness professionals and ranked 39 possible trends on a scale of popularity for the new year. In case you missed it, here’s our Rugged Recap of the top 5.

Wearable Tech – Having dropped to number 3 last year, wearable tech is back to top spot. This has come as no surprise to us with some form of wearable tech being on most of Team Rugged’s Christmas list! One of the main benefits of wearable tech is how it gamifies day-to-day life. ‘Can I hit those 10,000 steps?’ ‘how many more calories do I need to burn to earn than extra donut?’. It helps to make regular tasks more competitive and fun, plus allows you to track and record your progress.

Group Training – With F45 gyms popping up everywhere, including one near commercial HQ in Bristol, it’s clear that group training is becoming more and more popular and definitely deserves its number 2 spot on this list. Group training is great if you lack a bit of motivation or knowledge of the best way to train. Personally, I don’t particularly enjoy cardio, but I love the two cardio group sessions I attend in the week, Bootcamp and Box Fit. I was sceptical at first, but now I’m a complete convert and haven’t missed a session in 4 months! I’d highly recommend giving it a go.

HIIT – Last year’s number one has dropped a couple of places, but is still very much at the top of the trends. With millions of Brits stating that they’re ‘too busy’ to exercise, HIIT is another unsurprising entry. With ‘The Body Coach’ and other social media fitness guru’s posting free HIIT sessions almost daily, it’s hard to find an excuse not to spend that spare 10-20 minutes you may have to do a HIIT session. The benefits are clear, you often need no equipment and it’s a quick way to burn off calories and up the endorphins. In my opinion I’d much rather push myself to my limits doing a 10-20 minute HIIT workout than get bored running on a treadmill for an hour.

Older Adults – With more and more research highlighting the benefits of staying active into older age, gyms, leisure and community centres are making a big push towards promoting active ageing. Many new retirement villages are installing age-specific gyms into their complexes and ensuring exercise classes are built into weekly activities. We are thrilled that our CardioWall has become the focus of new medical research that is looking into the benefits of exercise that mentally and physically stimulates older adults, specifically those with age related diseases.

Bodyweight Training – This trend ties in quite nicely with HIIT, any excuses along the lines of ‘it’s too expensive to go to the gym’ go straight out of the window here. It’s completely free to drop to the floor and do 50 press ups or to do a quick circuit with squats, lunges and hip bridges. When I went travelling, I didn’t want to spend excess money, that could’ve gone towards food and new experiences, on a gym pass. This meant the vast majority of the time the only way I could exercise was using body weight. There are so many variations of bodyweight movements and so many different training techniques which you can incorporate into bodyweight workouts that it never gets boring!

As a fairly general conclusion of these trends, it is clear that making fitness fun, motivational and accessible to all is a strong underlying theme. These are three concepts that we at Rugged are striving to achieve and will continue to build on for 2019.

Fitness should be available and achievable for all, so try something new, find something you enjoy and stick to it - fitness is too important to be boring.

Keep your eyes peeled for Rugged’s view on trends 5-10 coming next week!