Top 2016 Fitness Trends

If you think about it, fitness shouldn’t be trendy but an ingrained part of your life. It’s not about IF you’re going to exercise but when and how. Fitness trends come and go as new research comes out about different forms of exercise or someone devises a new approach to working out. To some degree, novel fitness trends are simply modifications of old ones – it’s hard to come out with something completely new, but it’s always interesting to see what will be hot in the upcoming year.

So, what’s in the works for 2016? Every year the American College of Sports Medicine does a survey of fitness trends around the world – what’s trending upwards. Here are the highlights of the survey.

Wearable Technology is On Fire

Earning the top spot on the trend meter is wearable technology, including fitness apps, fitness trackers, heart rate monitors, GPS trackers, and smartwatches. While these devices might not be 100% accurate, if they keep you motivated and accountable, they’re serving a useful purpose. Surveys show 41% of Americans own one of these devices and that number is likely to grow.

Here’s the not so good news. One survey that polled more than 6,000 individuals found over a third of wearable technology users stopped using the monitoring device they purchased within 6 months. It’s useless if you leave it in a drawer and it certainly won’t do the work for you. Still, people are embracing them and the trend will likely grow.

Body Weight Training

You’re probably familiar with bodyweight training and already incorporate it into your workouts. Bodyweight training consists of exercises that use your own body weight as resistance – think push-ups, pull-ups, planks, and unweighted squats and lunges. The popularity of bodyweight training stems from the fact that the only equipment you need is YOU. It’s an ideal form of training when you don’t have access to barbells or dumbbells or have to work out in a hotel room while traveling. One limitation: you’ll eventually adapt to the stress of working against your own body weight and need more stimulation. That’s when dumbbells, barbells, and resistance bands come in handy.

High-Intensity Interval Training

No list of fitness trends would be complete without high-intensity interval training (HIIT). HIIT training no longer holds the number one spot on the trend chart as it did previously, likely because it’s so much a part of the fitness culture already.  With HIIT training, you build aerobic AND anaerobic endurance by doing short bursts of vigorous exercise followed by a recovery.  In terms of heart health, research shows vigorous exercise is more effective than moderate-intensity exercise. It looks like HIIT is here to stay, for good reason – it works.

Strength Training

What fitness list would be complete without strength training? All too often, good-intentioned people seeking to lose weight and “tone up,” start an exercise program, but they make the mistake of devoting most of their time on cardio. Bad move. Strength training is no less important than cardio and when you consider the effect aging has on your body composition – it’s even more important.

You begin losing muscle mass after the age of 30. Along with loss of strength, you become less powerful. Loss of muscle strength and mass are the main reason people become frail as they approach their golden years. Strength training is the one thing you can do to hang on to more lean body mass. Not to mention, high-resistance strength training helps preserve bone health. Regardless of what the trends state, strength training never goes out of style.

Functional Fitness

Strength training isn’t just about being strong but channeling that strength into the activities you do every day. That’s what functional fitness is all about. Functional training includes exercises that teach your muscles and nervous system to work better together – to execute movements more fluidly and with greater coordination.

With functional training, your body becomes more adept at doing the activities you do throughout the day like walking down the stairs carrying a load of laundry, picking up heavy objects off the floor, and doing a myriad of other tasks that require strength and coordination. With functional fitness, you’re not JUST training specific muscles but teaching them to work together as a unit.

Functional exercises are typically compound movements that work multiple muscle groups at the same time, not isolation ones. This type of training has a place in everyone’s fitness routine. If you’re older, it can help you stay active. If you’re younger, it can help you perform better in sports and in your daily activities. What’s not to love about that?

Yoga

Yoga still makes the list of the top 10 fitness trends for 2016. No wonder! It’s a perfect complement to strength training – a way to lengthen tight muscles and increase flexibility while strengthening the mind-body connection. Yoga is also an ideal recovery workout for days you’re giving your muscles a break. Although we think of yoga as being for relaxation and flexibility, some forms of yoga, like power yoga, boost your heart rate, burn calories, and build muscle endurance. Hardly a fad, yoga has been around for more than 5,000 years. Yes, it’s still with us.

Other 2016 Fitness Trends

While not in the top ten, but still making the list are circuit training, sports-specific training, core training, and flexibility and mobility rollers. Smartphone exercise apps are also growing in popularity. In fact, flexibility and smartphone exercise apps are new trends for 2016 that didn’t make the list in the past.

You’re probably already familiar with mobility rollers, more commonly referred to as foam rollers. They’re a form of self-myofascial release, a technique you can do at home to restore muscle function by releasing tight fascia and adhesions that limit your range of motion. Working out the muscle “kinks” can help you perform better when you strength train while lowering your risk for injury.  Spend five minutes after warming up to work on mobility and see if it makes your strength workout a little easier.

The Bottom Line

Fitness trends come and go, but some things never go out of style. One of those things is the importance of being consistent with your workouts. Make exercise a part of your life, just as eating and sleeping are. All of the exercise types listed above have benefits – if you commit to doing them.

 

References:

ACSM’S Health & Fitness Journal: November/December 2015 – Volume 19 – Issue 6 – p 9-18 doi: 10.1249/FIT.0000000000000164.

NY Times Well. “Assessing the Fitness of Wearable Tech”

Blast. “Do Fitness Trackers Work?”

ACE Healthy Living. “What is functional strength training?”

J Strength Cond Res. 2013 Mar;27(3):812-21. doi: 10.1519/JSC.0b013e31825c2bc1.

 

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