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The first rule of fitness trends is that you should ignore them. After all, the basic principles of exercise are unchanging: move around, lift things, get out of breath, recover.
The second rule is that you should sometimes ignore the first rule. After all, we do make progress around the margins. Isn’t it nice that running shoes are more comfortable and gym teachers are less yelly than they used to be?
In that spirit, here are four fitness trends to watch for in 2025:
Circadian engineering
In recent years, tech bro biohackers have pursued a variety of increasingly arcane health hacks to supposedly extend their lives or improve their function: ketones, cryosaunas, even infusions of young blood. Now they’re chasing something cheaper and almost certainly more helpful: morning sunlight.
What began as a quest to get better sleep has morphed into a broader concern with circadian rhythms, the body’s inner clocks, which influence everything from mental acuity and digestion to hair loss and heart disease risk. The vicissitudes of modern life – artificial light, long-haul travel, late-night snacks, social media – wreak havoc on these rhythms, as science journalist Lynne Peeples explains in her new book, The Inner Clock.
Circadian science is still young. For example, it’s only in the past few decades that we’ve realized, in addition to rods and cones, we have a third type of light receptor in our eyes – one that responds to the subtle colour differences between morning and evening light.
That means we can expect a wave of circadian-friendly products such as personal light-exposure trackers and wavelength-shifting indoor lights. In the meantime, you can’t go wrong making like a biohacker and seeking natural light.
Fast-twitch muscles
One of the most powerful motivations for exercise is the desire to remain healthy and capable of living independently for as long as possible into old age. That requires a combination of muscular strength and aerobic fitness, which is why public health guidelines recommend a mix of strength and endurance training.
But there may be something missing from that picture. To climb stairs or push yourself out of an armchair doesn’t just require strength, it requires muscle power, which is the ability to exert force in a rapid burst. Strength drops by 0.5 to 1 per cent per year as you age; muscle power drops by 2 to 4 per cent.
Accumulating evidence suggests this steep loss of power happens because our explosive fast-twitch muscle fibres atrophy sooner than the slow-twitch fibres we use for sustained efforts. The implication is that we need to keep taxing our fast-twitch fibres, either by lifting relatively heavy weights or by doing explosive movements like jumps.
Lactate monitoring
Two big trends are set to converge.
One is the current mania for lactate testing among elite endurance athletes. Inspired by the success of Norwegian superstars such as track runner Jakob Ingebrigtsen, athletes are repeatedly interrupting their training sessions to take a pinprick of blood from their fingertips or earlobe to measure lactate levels, which provide a sensitive but cumbersome gauge of exactly how much stress their bodies are under.
The other is the broader popularity of “zone 2″ exercise, which advocates long sessions of exercise at a very precise intensity that’s neither too easy nor too hard. The best way to lock in the right intensity is to test your lactate levels, but that’s not feasible for most.
Some time in 2025 the first continuous lactate monitors should hit the market, enabling exercisers to measure lactate in real time without taking blood samples. At least half a dozen companies are working on the problem, ranging from medical device giant Abbott to Belgian startup IDRO, which is targeting the first quarter of next year for its release. How well these new devices will work and how much they’ll cost remains to be seen, but one way or another we’ll be talking about them.
The end of injuries
Okay, that’s wishful thinking. But as the era of big data from wearable tech meets the rise of AI analytics, some sports scientists are optimistic that they’ll finally be able to identify impending injuries before they happen. A slight hitch in your stride, an asymmetry in your posture – biomechanical analysis will detect it, then corrective exercises will fix it.
At the pro level in sports such as basketball and hockey, this sort of movement screening is reaching a tipping point in popularity. It’s only a matter of time before similar protocols spread to the masses. If they genuinely help reduce injuries, it will be a really big deal for all of us.
But the evidence isn’t yet convincing. And what about the human factors? Why is it, for example, that perfectionists tend to get more shin splints?
For now, the best advice I can offer to ensure a happy, healthy and injury-free 2025 is this: If something hurts, ease up and take a break. It’s not high-tech, and it’s not easy advice to follow – but it will still be true a year from now.
Alex Hutchinson is the author of the forthcoming book The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map.
