The world is moving faster than ever before. Trends are changing more quickly than they did five years ago and fitness trends are no exception.
‘Millennials’ – according to the Oxford Living Dictionaries – are those people who became adults in the early 21st century. So a person who turned 21 in 2003, for instance, would be classified as a millennial. However, this is just a guideline as people from all generations can display millennial characteristics. For example, a typical millennial fitness trend is people tracking their fitness using devices such as a FitBit or apps on their phones. However, many a baby boomer can be seen sporting a FitBit as they can see the benefit of using this tool to monitor their fitness.
There are a number of trends in fitness that can be seen among millennials. Here are a couple.
Tracking fitness using fitness trackers
Fitness trackers are devices that you wear to monitor your health and fitness information, such as your heart rate and levels of physical activity. These devices are connected to the Internet and feed this information to a dashboard where it is analysed and you can draw insights from this data to help you in achieving your fitness goals.
If you wear a fitness tracker when you exercise, the tracker reads the amount of activity that you do – such as the steps you take or the number of times you go to the gym – and rewards you based on this. So the more active you are the higher your reward levels.
The trend of fitness trackers is becoming so popular that many app developers – both for Android and Apple – have started to develop fitness apps that function in the same manner that a wearable fitness tracker does. This makes it much more affordable for millennials to monitor their fitness.
The trend towards veganism
In the last little while, there’s been an increasing trend among millennials to adopt a vegan lifestyle. While vegetarians avoid meat and fish, but are allowed eggs and dairy, vegans avoid eating anything that originates from animals. They also don’t wear substances such as leather or wool.
Many millennials are adopting the vegan lifestyle as it:
- Reduces their carbon footprint and is more sustainable,
- Reduces many health risks that come with unrestricted eating, for example regularly eating fatty means can cause coronary artery disease, and
- Eliminates the killing of animals.
Although not strictly a fitness trend, but because nutrition is an integral part of fitness the trend towards veganism can be thought of part of this movement. Chains of grocery shops have started to manufacture ranges of food products that are vegan friendly as they are getting more and more requests for vegan products.
Mind-body exercise is popular among millennials
Millennials are very conscious of attaining a work-life balance. They are not interested in working themselves to death as their parents did. They are looking at achieving satisfaction in what they do and integrating their work into their life as opposed to the other way round.
Millennials are not just applying this principle to their working lives. They are looking at achieving a balance in the way that they approach fitness. Yes, you’ll still see people pumping iron in the gym and working on various parts of their bodies to achieve certain fitness goals. However, more and more mind-body exercises – such as Yoga – have become increasingly popular among millennials and not the exclusive domain of the Yogis. As Yoga has many valuable teachings and teaches students to be in the moment during the class, millennials are using this form of exercise to not only keep their bodies fit but to also calm and focus their minds.
There are many, many fitness trends out there and millennials are at the forefront of trying these out. However, these trends must not be seen as the exclusive domain of this generation of individuals. Anyone can choose to take part in these movements if they enjoy them and they feel that these will help them to reach their fitness goals quickly and easily.