5 Trends That Will Shape the Future of Your Health and Fitness

You don’t need to be a professional athlete to reap the benefits of sport and to learn how it can make you stronger or even boost your creativity and productivity. It’s more important to figure out how sport can play a part in your well-being and to work on your own winning formula to find balance.

To predict future trends in the sport-life arena, we took a look at human habits and behaviors, as well as digital technology’s impact on how we shape our approach to health, fitness, and well-being. We worked with industry experts, futurists, behavioral economists, neuro- and sport scientists to identify forward-looking developments in their respective fields, and further validated them by going to everyday people conducting the first-ever adidas Wellness Poll, surveying 3,000 US-based men and women of various activity levels aged 18–50.

Here’s what we found out:

What do you eat? How much do you work out? What apps do you use? The answers to these questions define who we are and how we feel. Our bodies, minds, and the choices we make moment by moment are all deeply connected. We have started to intuitively understand that our path to healthy living is not about looking at one single metric, but balancing the whole. In the future, we’ll be empowered with an integrated and holistic profile of our data, combining movement, mindset, rest, and nutrition.

We live IRL. Technology and the digital world influence our lifestyles, but interpersonal relationships remain at the core of our mental and physical health. Authentic human connection will become a key metric in gauging our well-being as online social networks inspire more offline action. 

Chocolate? A bowl of ice cream? A brisk walk instead of running? What’s good and what’s bad for you? The answer: one size does NOT fit all. Our behavior depends on a number of daily decisions.

Technology will soon help redefine tomorrow’s habits by helping people understand what works for them as individuals; recommendations based off of societal mean will be a thing of the past.

We can already measure every step we take, every kilometer we run, every hour we sleep, but what does it all add up to? As technology and science advance, we will be able to value the collective benefits of movement, nutrition, rest, and mindfulness, further encouraging positive habit change by connecting our actions to the things we care about.

Gone will be the days when a doctor is the sole information gatekeeper. Our health and fitness apps will continue to expand their capabilities in providing us with important data, but key to this will be interpreting the data to better understand our individual experiences. This is where we’ll partner with our health and wellness professionals, assuming equal partnership to help gain personalized insights and individualized actions that can improve our overall well-being. This is the power of personalized information. “It’s estimated that by 2018, 70% of healthcare organizations globally will invest in consumer-facing technology including apps, wearables, remote monitoring, and virtual care.” (Emedcart)

 What future trend are you most excited about?