Top 10 Health & Fitness Industry Trends and Predictions for 2017

Health and Fitness Industry Trends for 2017

1. Facebook Live

I don’t know if you know this, but Facebook Live is a feature you can use on your Facebook account to increase your organic reach, whether it’s from your fan page, personal profile page, or in your groups.

Not only does it help you increase your reach, but it’s an easy and seamless tool to use. For example, instead of having to record a video and upload it to YouTube, you can now record a video and it’s already on YouTube.

What makes Facebook Live a top fitness industry trend? Because it’s a great platform that will help you engage with your audience. You can answer their questions in real time – and show them that you’re a real person.

We’ve noticed that Facebook actually favors Facebook Live when it comes to organically reaching more viewers versus other types of videos. So, if you enjoy doing video, this is a big opportunity.

2. YouTube

Video will only become more popular. It’s now a major feature not only with Facebook but also on Instagram. Pretty much all social media platforms will eventually go towards adding more video on their platforms because people engage with video so much more deeply than other forms of content.

YouTube has been around for a long time and actually is now the second-largest search engine in the world. It’s an amazing place to offer anything that’s going to teach people something: tutorials, how-to demonstrations like recipes, workouts, or just answering frequently asked questions.

It’s also great place to develop a loyal following.

For example, I have 900 videos on YouTube that have been seen by over 23 million people. I obviously believe in it, and some of our best customers come from YouTube. If you have a gym or access to an area to demonstrate via video, YouTube is the place where you want to do that.

Plus, as the following graph shows, Youtube can yield some of your best customers since they’ve “binge” consumed a lot of your content or at least spent a lot of time on your channel/videos.

3. Personalization

Not many businesses are embracing personalization because it isn’t necessarily scalable. Before I explain, let me differentiate personalization from segmentation.

There are many different services that you can use online to help segment your audience through filtering, by asking them a simple question which will lead them into different segments of your email list.

And that’s totally cool because it’s a smart way to market – you’re segmenting people based on their interests or where they’re at in their health and fitness journey.

But personalization is about reaching out to people online and introducing yourself as a real person so you can build an actual relationship.

I know that’s not a scalable thing to do but I believe it is probably going to be the most impactful thing you can do in your online business.

Why?

Because if you want to build your online business, you have to do more of the same types of things you’d do to build an off-line business. And that basically means interacting with human beings at a deeper level. That’s a big opportunity not many people or businesses are going to take advantage of.

4. Millennial Mindset

We know the millennials are a big segment of the population – they presently range in age from about 18 to 35 years old.

The trouble is that a lot of people think that millennials don’t have a lot of money to spend. And that’s kind of true, at least compared to the baby boomers.

But here’s the thing: relative to the amount of money they make, millennials spend the highest percentage of their income on health and wellness, which is very interesting. They’re a very proactive group of individuals who value their health.

[sourced from infographic here]

What I’ve noticed in my business is that you can have a millennial mindset but not necessarily be a millennial.

I believe a great trend is to target people who have that millennial mindset, which is all being proactive. It’s someone who is what I call a health enthusiast – someone you don’t have to convince to exercise. It’s someone who already enjoys exercising, who’s going to yoga sessions and grabbing a green juice afterwards, who enjoys all of that stuff.

Tapping into that demographic is a big opportunity, especially if you’re somebody who is tired of convincing people that they should be eating well and exercise more regularly. Think about tapping into people who have the millennial mindset.

5. Baby Boomers

There is a great opportunity in targeting the aging population. People are living longer now and hopefully we, as wellness practitioners, can help them live longer with a better quality of life. I think developing training programs specific to the aging population is a huge opportunity as this infographic from the Heart and Stroke Foundation shows…

There are obviously a number of experts and facilities around North America that are already doing a great job catering to these individuals. But I don’t think there’s anything more gratifying than seeing a 90-year-old woman deadlifting 200 pounds, or throwing a kettlebell around, or using battling ropes. That’s pretty inspiring.

The baby boomer population is spending the largest amount of money on wellness. Whether it’s prevention or reversing conditions that they already have. From the strength-training perspective as well as a nutrition/supplemental perspective, it’s a demographic that should not be ignored.

6. Type 2 Diabetes

Type 2 diabetes isn’t going away any time soon. But the thing is, type 2 diabetes is really the most optimistic disease that you can possibly have. As a health expert you probably know that it’s completely reversible through diet and exercise alone in most cases.

When we compared type 2 diabetes to things like cancer, heart disease, or obesity, type 2 diabetes is something that we can make significant progress on in a very short amount of time by helping people exercise more intelligently – and eating better as well.

More than 10 percent of the North American population has type 2 diabetes. That’s pretty alarming.

It used to be called adult-onset diabetes but now kids as young as 10 years old are being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, and it continues to become more of an epidemic across the entire age span.

That’s a massive opportunity for developing solutions because it is something that can go from despair to amazing results in a very short amount of time.

7. Smarter Workouts

There’s been a huge fitness industry trend over the past decade pushing really insane, insanity-type workouts like P90X and CrossFit. But with all of that comes a side effect, which is a body that is absolutely crushed.

You cannot maintain that level of intensity in exercise for too long. It causes tremendous wear and tear. Eventually you body just starts to wear down, whether it’s from adrenal fatigue, or your joints start to act up, or you’re just absolutely burned out.

As a former professional soccer player, I can tell you firsthand what happens. Think about it: you don’t know many professional athletes over the age of 35. There’s a reason for that. Their bodies cannot maintain that volume or intensity of training for very long – maybe a decade and a half at the most.

Here’s the thing when it comes to training and workouts: we want to look the minimum effective dose to get results. I think that’s going to be a big trend moving forward as more people simply can’t keep up with the intensity of all these workouts.

I think there’s going to be a big swing in the marketplace with respect to going back to smarter workouts, with less volume and more intelligently designed workouts.

8. Facebook Messenger

Facebook Messenger now allows you to communicate with your audience almost as if they were on your email list. Some of this app’s features are really cool.

For instance, say you send an email to your audience. You can ask them to respond to you via email or via Facebook Messenger. You can do this via a simple URL, which is: m.me/yourFacebookhandle.

That’s going to allow people to click on the link within your email , which will open up Facebook Messenger, allowing you to have a more engaged conversation.

There are also some cool automation tools that allow you to create auto-responder-like sequences inside Facebook Messenger. You can now even run Facebook ads that connect directly to your Messenger account.

 

I believe Facebook Messenger is going to be a huge opportunity to connect with your audience in a new way, especially for those who spend more of their time on Facebook rather than email.

9. More Certifications

If you’re somebody who has an educational company or you’re looking to provide certifications to health and fitness pros, I think the opportunity here is going to be massive.

One of the reasons certifications are becoming even more prominent is because of the democratization and demonetization of content. What that means is that information is now ubiquitous – it’s everywhere. Which means the perceived value of that information has become much lower.

One of the ways we can get around that is by tying in our teachings, our education, and our information into a certification component to increase the perceived value and obviously the usability of that information in the marketplace.

As an example (and seen below), my good friend, Jon Goodman at the Personal Trainer Development Center, has a great certification program (called the Online Trainer Academy) which “certifies” trainers on how to train clients online.

Precision Nutrition, my very own Super Nutrition Academy, and dozens of other organizations now offer certifications to help professionals become even better at what they do and rise above the noise.

Plus, as a professional, adding another certification to your belt is just one more way you can separate yourself from everyone else. It allows you to raise your prices because of the value you bring to the market.

10. Content Creation and Curation

Creating content – or curating existing content – that is niche-specific is going to continue to become even more important in 2017.

When it comes to being a health or fitness professional, it’s a crowded marketplace. It’s hard to stand out. There are riches in the niches when it comes to this market.

That’s why I always say you have to go narrow – you have to become a very specific kind of specialist.

With that said, one of the best ways to become a thought leader and increase your relevance and intrinsic value in the marketplace, is to bring content together, curated or create your own, in a way that serves that specific niche. Become the thought leader of a very small pool of people and watch what happens to your business.

Here’s What To Do Next…

So there you have it, the top 10 trends in health, fitness and wellness industry that are coming your way 2017 and beyond. If there’s s anything you feel that I’ve missed just let me know in the comments.

In the meantime, if you want an unfair advantage to “failure proofing” your online health or fitness business in this SUPER competitive landscape, then I’d recommend you download my “Idea Filter”.

I bet it will quickly become your 2-page secret weapon to figuring out which idea/product/service is worth pursuing, while saving yourself from terrible opportunities and ideas that suck away your time, money, and energy.

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