Health and Fitness Predictions in 2020
I have never been particularly good at guessing what the future holds — hence my heavy reliance on checking the weather and mild obsession with reading my horoscope on the co-star app to get through my days 24 hours at a time. If you are like me, guessing the future may not be your forte, but it is still fun to try now and then.
Like fashion, how we move and how we eat are often subject to trends. NASM Elite Trainer Mike Fantigrassi and NASM Master Instructor Angie Miller were able to weigh in with their expertise to make some future of fitness predictions as we open up the chapter to a new decade.
Fantigrassi is a 20+ year veteran in the fitness industry working as a fitness manager, personal trainer, and nutrition coach prior to joining NASM full-time in 2010. Miller is a dynamic fitness professional and Licensed Professional Counselor; she has worked as an educator and speaker and keeps up-to-date in this field that is constantly evolving.
Looking into their crystal balls (or really, inward into their own experience), we discussed a few predictions and hopes they had for 2020 and beyond.
Mike Fantigrassi’s fitness predictions
Moderate Macros
2019 was all about Keto and my friends pretending that they were somehow in ketosis after a mere five hours of not eating pizza (and I get it – five hours without the stuff is a long time).
Fantigrassi predicts that some concepts from Keto will stick, but it will come back to moderation – Keto brought fat back in vogue (we are all thankful!) but took away our carbs. Fantigrassi believes that people will start to land in the middle, eating a more moderate amount of fat and carbs, which, as he puts it, “is probably the healthy place to be.”
Diet trends give us a chance for experimentation, and ideally with that experimentation we are able to take parts of lessons that work for us and ditch the ones that no longer serve us. Fantigrassi hopes that these experiments with Keto will help people cut down on their daily sugar intake in a more sustainable way going forward.
Longevity Lives On
As someone who recently entered a new decade in age last month, this one resonates with me. Fantigrassi believes there will be a higher focus on preventative fitness (e.g., more recovery and mobility) and more moderate levels of high intensity training (e.g., CrossFit and Orange Theory classes).
“Can I do the things I like to do and not be in pain while doing them? As we grow older, fitness is not just about how much we can bench press. It’s about being able to go bike with your kids – it’s individual for everybody, but we all want to be able to move and not be in pain,” Fantigrassi explains, “Looking good is an element of fitness, but feeling good is more important over time.”
Easy Access
Fantigrassi believes we’re going to continue to see a rise in accessibility and convenience with food and fitness. While companies like Hello Fresh and Daily Harvest have been at it for a few years now, Fantigrassi is hopeful that this segment will continue to expand as companies gain more efficiency in the way food can be prepared and shipped. He also believes that people will adapt a more hybrid training model, exercising more at home with apps and equipment like Peloton to supplement their gym memberships and boutique fitness class routines.
Other fitness predictions
In looking into his crystal ball, Fantigrassi made a few other guesses on the future trends for fitness: CBD options will continue to grow this year, and big-name brands (such as Gatorade) will start giving consumers more natural alternatives to their well-known products.
What is going away? Fantigrassi believes that people spend a lot of money on products that may or may not have any benefit, and that consumers may start to scrutinize the supplements and products they are buying if they are not seeing an impact.
Angie Miller’s fitness trend predictions
Integrated Health
Overall health is complicated. Health involves putting several distinctive pieces of the puzzle together: mental health, physical health, diet, exercise – the list goes on and continues to expand. Miller is hopeful that these pieces are starting to come together, both in physical space (as in, different types of practices and trainers physically working under the same roof) and respect, as there continues to be more collaboration between experts in different functioning practices.
“Cities like Denver are leading the way in doing this exceptionally well,” explains Miller, “There is better alignment and collaboration between chiropractors, yoga instructors, and therapists and functional medicine people. Practitioners are respecting one another and staying in their space—it looks like healthy boundaries and healthy collaborations. We are alerting the community that you can’t have one without the others. You cannot be emotionally well if you are not physically well and vice versa.”
Rethinking Self-Care
Angie Miller and I talked a lot about the more recent focus on self-care movement. “We’ve made a whole economy out of self-care,” Miller joked; we cannot just buy a $30 candle and call it a day.
As Miller best explains, “self-care comes down to how well do we manage stress, our thoughts, and how we set boundaries. At the end of the day, setting healthy boundaries and understanding our own personal limits and minding our own mind matters.”
Miller is hopeful that the self-care movement will continue to thrive and evolve, and hopes that the focus will be more on feeling good than buying more stuff. She also hopes that taking the time out of our day for ourselves comes with less guilt – “we all need time,” she declared.
Mental Matters
Miller recognizes that talking about mental health still comes with a major stigma – and she is hopeful that the trend of being open and talking about our emotional wellness will continue to grow. She knows that words matter, and to take away the stigma we can make simple changes like softening the language we use to talk about it (like saying “emotional wellness” instead of “mental health”).
Miller is hopeful that we are more conscious about mindfulness, but she recognizes change takes time. “I think we are moving toward a society which honors that being healthy isn’t just about having big biceps, tight buns and big guns. We’re a complete package inside and out. It’s really what you can’t see that matters the most. It’s your heart and lungs and your emotional wellness.”
What are your predictions?
What do you think 2020 and beyond holds for the future of health and fitness? If you are better at predicting the future than I am (note: you are), we want to hear your thoughts! And if you have any real future vision, please feel free to leave some hot stock tips for us all in the comments.
