2024 was the year of hardcore fitness. If you weren’t vomiting in a bucket during a Hyrox competition or developing hypothermia in an ice bath, you just weren’t trying hard enough.
Thankfully, 2025 looks set to be a much more sensible affair in which trends that have grown over the past few years mature into the mainstream and arrive at gyms and studios near you.
According to experts, some of the biggest changes we’ll see in fitness in 2025 will be driven by demographics as the UK’s ageing population looks for ways to extend health into older age.
Fraser Smith, founder and chief executive of London’s Vive Fitness, explains: “There is an overall shift towards health and longevity as people realise that performing training specific to your daily demands makes sense. For example, you can have muscular strength that has little day-to-day benefit. What’s the point of being able to chest press heavy weights but not being able to reach your shoelaces, or the top shelf of the cupboard? It becomes a matter of common sense. What is a better use of your time, and which has the better overall outcome in terms of how well you function physically?”
As millions start thinking about their New Year’s fitness goals, here are some of the trends you can expect to see next year.
While lifespan refers to the length of your life, health span represents the number of years a person can expect to live in good health, free from chronic diseases, frailty, and debilitating conditions. It focuses on the quality of life rather than just the quantity of years.
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Fraser explains: “People are looking at ways to add life to years, rather than years to life. This involves training in a way that adds quality to day-to-day life. A common issue for those we see is that people may have a healthy heart because they run or cycle, but they have bad backs and poor movement.
“People are [now] looking to use a variety of modalities to ensure everything from cardiovascular health to positive mental well-being, which will add quality of life to your later years rather than just some extra tough years to your life.”
By 2030, one in six people will be 60 or older. As the aging population continues to grow, fitness has become increasingly popular among older adults who are more cognisant than ever of the benefits of activity.
Anthony Mayatt is a TRX (total resistance exercise) coach and owner of Breathe Fitness London. TRX is a form of suspension training that uses your body weight and gravity to develop strength, balance, flexibility, and core stability, and is something we can do at any age.
Mayatt says: “Going into 2025 you can see more classes and gyms focusing on older adults with classes catered to them. Many TRX coaches do this already due to the fact it works on your stability, balance and overall joint health – plus it’s safe to use.”
Functional fitness
Functional fitness relates to a method of training in which exercise engages several muscle groups and mimics everyday movements to improve not only strength, but also balance and movement as well.
As Fraser explains: “Functional fitness, or being ‘fit-to-function’, refers to training in a way that ensures your body has the strength, mobility, coordination and all-round capability to perform movements required for everyday tasks. For normal non-athletes, this could be ensuring you are able to get up the stairs or stand up from a chair, whereas for an athlete it means movements relevant to their sport, such as having the flexibility to stretch for a ball in tennis or the power to quickly change direction in football.
“For the majority of people, functional training is a better use of time, as it improves strength, cardiovascular health, movement range, coordination, general health and wellbeing.”
The popularity of exercise as a social activity can be seen in the rise in the number of running clubs across the country, where the social element is often the main driver to joining.
The rise of social-driven fitness is also illustrated by the growth in social sports like padel, which is like a hybrid between tennis and squash and played in doubles. Padel is widely considered the fastest growing sport in the world with more than 25 million players worldwide.
The number of people participating in fitness classes and working out in groups has been steadily increasing with over six million people regularly attending some form of fitness class.
Omnifitness
‘Omnifitness’ was a buzzword at fitness industry conferences this year and the concept is filtering through to gyms and studios. Omnifitness describes combining traditional gym experiences with digital solutions. As an example, people taking the popular Blaze high intensity interval training (HIIT) classes at David Lloyd Clubs can wear Myzone activity monitors in-class, which are connected to screens to show effort levels.
David Lloyd also runs on-demand Blaze classes for its members to access at home, and using the Myzone app allows you to share results with other members and with Blaze trainers as you would in a class.
2025 could be the year that Apple and Fitbit lose their grip on the wearable market. Smaller wearables such as Whoop wrist straps and Oura rings are taking market share. Smart rings in particular are growing in popularity as technology shrinks and allows more functions to be crammed into ever smaller devices.
The smart ring market is predicted to reach £1bn by 2032 and Oura was recently valued at $5bn.
Time efficient training and exercise snacking
From 45-minute HIIT classes that pack maximum effort into a short session to 20-minute EMS sessions that use electrical stimulation to fire up muscles, short bursts of exercise throughout the day instead of one long session are increasingly becoming popular with the time-poor.
As Fraser, whose studio specialises in EMS training, explains: “EMS maximises what can be achieved in 20-minute sessions. Our members experience gains in strength, balance, muscle mass, cardiovascular health, coordination, pain cessation and several other health benefits. Overlaying training with EMS can achieve results that conventional training is not always capable of.”
For those looking to reduce training to 30 minutes, he advises setting clear goals, using whole body movements that activate multiple muscle groups, concentrating on quality slower movements over faster erratic ones, seeking professional guidance, and using tech such as apps and trackers to ensure time is maximised.
Whoop Coach is an AI coach that offers individualised responses to users’ health and fitness, drawing on data and performance science. You can ask it questions such as “I have a 5k next month with a goal of running it in 24 minutes. Can you build me a training programme?” and it will develop a programme using your personal data. Expect others to launch their own AI coaching programme.
AI will also help recovery, as Steven Dick, director and co-founder of personal training course provider, The Fitness Group, explains: “Recovery technology will become even more sophisticated, offering personalised recovery plans based on biometrics and AI analysis. Wearable devices will monitor factors like muscle fatigue, hydration levels, and sleep quality, providing users with detailed recovery recommendations.”
Dance meditation
Sound-based practices like rhythmic meditative music and binaural beats are increasingly becoming popular wellbeing practices. Once seen by many as “woo-woo”, the emergence of ecstatic dance as a wellness trend is breaking into the mainstream. According to David Lloyd Clubs, which hosts SPIRIT Dance Meditation classes, searches for ecstatic dance have grown by 49 per cent in the past year and TikTok’s ‘Interpretive Dance Trend’ has seen 346.4 million posts.
Michelle Dand, head of fitness programming at David Lloyd Clubs, explains: “Conscious dance means allowing your body to lead the movement rather than your head leading the movement. Our lives can be so overwhelming, and in a dance meditation class, you feel like you’re taking control of yourself again.”
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