Article content Every year, the American College of Sports Medicine publishes a list of worldwide fitness trends. The annual top 20 is a reflection not only of what’s in vogue now, but also what we can expect to see more of in the future. The list was first published in 2006 and has chronicled a large shift in trends, including the quick rise and fall of Zumba, the introduction of HIIT (high intensity interval training) and home exercise gyms reaching an all-time high at No.
2 in 2022, only to fall to No. 13 in 2023 when we happily left our basements and returned to the neighbourhood gym. Defining a trend as “a general development or change in a situation or in the way that people are behaving” versus a fad (“a fashion that is taken up with great enthusiasm for a brief period; a craze”), the list was assembled from more than 2,000 responses to surveys sent to fitness professionals worldwide, including exercise physiologists, researchers and academics, personal trainers, strength and conditioning coaches, athletic trainers and medical professionals.
According to the experts, 2025 is all about tech with wearable technology claiming top spot followed by mobile exercise apps at No. 2 and data-driven training technology at No. 7.
It’s not surprising exercisers have become enamoured with tech. The availability of real-time statistics during a workout along with the archiving of past workout data allows fitness fanatics to get as granular as they like when evaluating the.
