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Top Fitness Trends in 2014 & Predictions for The New Year

Top Fitness Trends in 2014 & Predictions for The New Year
In This Article

Hello, January! It’s that time of year again — the gym parking lot is overflowing, and we’re all thinking about eating better and exercising more.

We were curious to see what fitness trends we could see among the 75 million MyFitnessPal users, so we sat down with our fitness and nutrition experts to take a look at the hot workouts from 2014. The mission: to predict what 2015’s hottest workouts will be.

We took the total number of minutes logged for each of these activities and divided by the number of active users on the app over the period of Jan-Nov of 2013 vs. Jan- Nov 2014. We did have a growth in our database over that time, so we corrected for the number of daily active users.

Here’s what MyFitnessPal’s coaching lead, Glennis Coursey, and our Registered Dietician, Elle Penner, have deemed the workouts to watch in 2015:

Trackers for Everyone!
A quick glance at 2014 data showed a huge lift in connected apps and devices last year — to the tune of 173.9%. That’s a whole lot of steps being counted by Fitbits or Jawbone Ups, and millions of runs and rides being tracked by apps like Runkeeper, MapMyFitness and Strava. Next year, we should see even more people get connected to get fit.

Dance, Dance: Revolution?
Zumba has been hot for a while, now – in 2013, our users tracked 13.7% more Zumba sessions than they did in 2012. Glennis and Elle pegged this high-energy favorite as a trend we should see continue into 2015. That said, even though millions of you are still shaking and shimmying your calories away in Zumba class, you logged 8% fewer minutes of Zumba in 2014 than in 2013.

Ballet Barre classes like Cardio Barre, Daily Method and Bar Method, which are based on workouts done by dancers, were up by a whopping 45.8%! We expect to see this trend continue as more and more people plié their way into 2015.

HIIT me Baby One More Time
Glennis and Elle cited Tabata, also known as High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), as a big trend for the new year. This quick workout is getting tons of attention not only for the health benefits it brings, but because it allows busy people to fit effective workouts into tight schedules. MyFitnessPal users must agree — this activity was up 19.6% in 2014.

Running on the Rise
Running is consistently in the top handful of exercises logged in MyFitnessPal — it clocked at #2 for the whole year (right after walking)! That’s a lot of miles logged over the year. Glennis and Elle agree that running is going to continue to be a big trend — it was up 7.1% in 2014.

Soul Standout
Although there are fewer than 40 studios in the US, it’s undeniable that there’s a tremendous buzz around SoulCycle. We anticipate this class (and cycling workouts inspired by it) will be in big demand in 2015. The celeb fave is up 78.3% since 2013.

Biking (indoor and out) is always in our top 3 logged workouts — and it was up overall 1% this year.

No matter how you resolve to burn your calories in 2015, we’ll be here to help you get inspired. Happy New Year (and new workouts)!

Read the Wall Street Journal’s article to find out more about the fitness trends of 2014.

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