It’s that time of the year again. As one year ends and a new one approaches, many of us are considering health-related resolutions for 2023. Dieting, weight loss, and fitness are expected to rank very highly as newly adopted resolutions but being healthy should be about more than looking great – it should be about feeling great too!
We’ve spent a lot of time perusing popular online health forums and talking with personal trainers around the London area to get a feel for the next big trends in modern fitness. What we discovered is that, for those who want to look and feel their best, the routines they adopt must be sustainable in their lives. If we just focus on that number on the scale or just want to get down to a specific dress size by a certain date, we’re likely to abandon our efforts once we achieve that goal.
Fortunately, in the post-pandemic society that we live in, many are beginning to see the benefits of adopting a healthy lifestyle for the long term, whether that means building a relationship with a personal trainer or making permanent changes to our diets to lose weight.
Based on our research, here are the top fitness tends set to define 2023:
Strength Training Returns
Strength training exercises aren’t just for those who want to tone their physique. In 2023, personal trainers are expected to encourage their clients to treat their muscles like the fabric of their longevity that they are.
Confused? Here’s what we mean: recent studies reveal that more muscle mass can actually contribute to living longer, healthier lives because more muscle can reduce the risk of suffering from chronic diseases. In fact, in a publication by the British Journal of Sports Medicine, it was pointed out that muscle-building exercises can reduce our risk of mortality by as much as 17 percent.
Society’s renewed focus on long-term health is expected to drive more of us toward resistance bands, kettlebells, and free weights to build that solid muscle mass we need. Also, more muscle mass means increasing our daily caloric burn rate and it makes all those daily movements in our lives feel like less of a struggle. The best part of strength training is that we aren’t required to work out constantly to build more muscle. Previous studies suggest that strength training twice per week is adequate to significantly enhance the level of muscle mass in our bodies.
Mini Workouts for Anywhere
Struggling to balance our work lives with our social obligations and parental requirements is just a sign of the times, and there’s no end in sight. For crying out loud, it’s even difficult to find enough time to get a decent night’s sleep anymore. That dynamic of modern life is fueling the popularity of “mini workouts” – a 10 to 15-minute version of the “standard” workout for people that just don’t have the time to commit to a full-length workout lasting 45 to 60-minutes.
Mini workouts go all the way back to 2013 when a study about high-intensity training emerged, but the timesaving component married with the fact that mini workouts can be done just about anywhere (without any equipment) means these workouts are expected to become wildly popular in the new year to come. One of the personal trainers that we routinely speak with for these articles with a fitness center in Canary Wharf (London) told us that she’s encouraging her clients to make a deliberate effort to spend less time “sitting still” and to prioritize physical movement, even while they’re sitting at a desk.
It's a formula that’s fueling the adoption of mini workouts because it shows people how they can make physical fitness a part of their daily lives, no matter how busy their lifestyle.
Wearable Technology Goes Mainstream
People everywhere are expected to continue relying on technology to improve just about every component of their daily lives; that includes wearable technical innovations to help the achieve their fitness goals. In fact, the global wearable technology market is on pace to reach $186.14 billion by 2030, growing at a rate of nearly 15% each year.
In the simplest terms, wearable fitness technologies are electronic devices engineered to be worn on the body. For example, smartwatches, medical devices, and fitness trackers. The allure of these devices is in the data that they can provide – that data is giving people a clearer understanding of their bodies, whether they want to track the amount of sleep they’re getting or how many steps they want to get in each day.
All-Natural Fat Burners
There’s no getting around the fact that successful fat loss means establishing a calorie-deficit in our bodies. But there’s also no denying that fat loss seems to get increasingly more challenging for many people as they get older. Our metabolism does slow down as we age, but people are increasingly looking to “amp up” their metabolism to achieve that calorie deficient state sooner by using all-natural fat burners like green tea, caffeine, and guarana.
Personal trainers and fitness professionals will all tell you the same thing: these supplements alone won’t help you burn off unwanted fat, but with the boost they can provide to your level of energy, they can play a crucial role in optimizing your workouts and curbing your appetite enough to see results.
Mobile Fitness Apps
Few would be surprised to discover that mobile fitness apps are a major trend in modern health. Mobile fitness apps are downloadable software programs that are installed on a phone, tablet, or other electronic device and they offer society an excellent array of resources that allow them to stay on top of their weight loss and fitness goals.
Last year, the fitness apps market generated almost $5.4 billion in revenue - a 54% increase over the prior year, and 2023 is shaping up to be another big year for the widespread adoption of these apps.
In fact, one recent study revealed that more than half of the smartphone owners in America now use these devices to collect health-related metrics or to exercise on a more consistent basis.
Greater Accessibility to Personal Fitness Trainers
Whether you want to lose a few pounds, or you’ve been spending hours at the gym and have reached a plateau, personalized fitness guidance is widely accessible to people of all fitness levels right now. The convenience and affordability of working one-on-one with a personal trainer has led to an increase in the number of people who are typing in “pt near me” as the next step in their fitness journeys to find out more about modern personal training options.
Most people are delighted to find that personal trainers aren’t drill sergeants; they’re allies to support you and they have the expertise to tailor a workout that’s adaptable to your unique lifestyle and can make their services accessible to new clients in myriad ways.
As 2023 approaches, the best approach to optimizing your health and fitness is to consider all the trends and to do your own research. Our recommendation isn’t just to act on the trends offering the most promise, but to remember to adopt the ones that are sustainable in your lives.