2025 Predictions in Health & Fitness

January 20, 2025

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, but one of my 2025 goals is to consistently create content about topics I'm passionate about. Fitness is one of them, if not the most prominent one. So in the spirit of the new year, I want to share a few trends I think have been shaping up over the past year and will likely continue to grow or break out in 2025.

2024 Recap

But first, let's take a look back at 2024. We saw the rise of run clubs, luxury fitness clubs, strength training, longevity, GLP-1s, and the Oura/WHOOP duopoly.

• Run Clubs broke out big in 2024, emerging as a fun and casual way to meet people in geographic proximity. According to Strava's 2024 Year In Sport report, there was a 59% increase in running club participation year-over-year. This trend may be partly driven by burnout from dating apps as more people look for authentic, real-world connections and a subtler cultural shift away from alcohol. Notably, Gen Z survey respondents were 4x more likely to prefer meeting people through working out than bars, and some run clubs in New York such as the Lunge Run Club have a black apparel dress code to signal that you're single. Some of that has trickled down to marathons, with the 2024 New York City Marathon attracting a near-record high of 165,000 applicants (beat only by the 2020 race which got canceled.)
• Luxury Fitness Clubs are also on the rise as awareness around holistic health and recovery continues to grow thanks to high-end wearables like WHOOP and Oura popularizing recovery scores and recovery products like Theraguns, NormaTec compression booths, and cold plunges slowly but steadily reaching mainstream consciousness. We're now seeing that trend taken to the max with new fitness club concepts like Love.Life and Continuum offering high price-point memberships for best-in-class experiences around fitness, recovery, and overall wellness. I think this trend will continue to grow in 2025 but am skeptical of broader adoption here due to consumer willingness to pay ever embracing pricepoint on the order of several hundred dollars a month.
• Longevity stil feels like a bit of a sleeper, but thanks to Bryan Johnson's Blueprint brand and Peter Attia's book Outlive, we're seeing growing awareness around longevity. Johnson's brand has drawn significant attention in both my early 30s circles and in mainstream media—even Netflix is running a documentary on him now.
• GLP-1s reached an all-time high in awareness and adoption this past year. The biggest winners outside of Lilly and Novo Nordisk were startups like Hims and Fella which provide a telehealth model for easier access to these drugs. Fella is a particularly interesting story because they were founded before GLP-1s started to become more mainstream with the mission to help men lose weight. Initially, their solution was more behavioral therapy-oriented, but with GLP-1s starting to break out in 2023, they pivoted to this new model.
• Oura has taken off in the high-end wearable category in the past year. I initially wrote this as the "WHOOP/Oura Duopoly", but after some sleuthing on Google Trends, it seems like 2024 was Oura's year. Just based on search interest, Oura is starting to generate significantly more demand than the other giant in this category, WHOOP. I think Oura's sharpened focus and repositioning around general wellness and women's health have started to pay off. They raised another large round at a valuation north of $5 billion and announced reaching sales of over 2.5 million rings to-date.

2025 Predictions

I think many of the 2024 trends will continue to grow in 2025, but here are the ones I think have still not quite hit the mainstream consciousness but that I suspect might start to in the coming year or two:

• HYROX and Hybrid Fitness: As someone who has focused exclusively on endurance or strength sports during different periods of my life, this one's a really exciting trend to watch. HYROX, a fitness race that started in Hamburg back in 2017 with 650 participants is now over 600,000 racers strong and more than doubling year over year. Functional, interval-style workouts have been popular for a while now (F45, Orangetheory, etc), but there hasn't been an experiential product that has capitalized on that. The format is accessible and easy to understand because it's eight 1 km runs with an exercise in between each like 100 wall balls or 200m farmer's carry. On the business side, it's very scalable. Unlike Tough Mudder or CrossFit, every HYROX event follows a consistent spec comprised of simple equipment and only requires a convention center-sized space, making it highly replicable across cities. Races in most major cities completely sell out, and they only recently made a concerted effort to grow in the U.S. I think we'll see opportunities for brands and influencers to benefit from the growth of this competition and the rise of hybrid fitness in general. HYROX is a great example of how Gen Z and Millennials are increasingly gravitating toward multiple modalities of fitness with strength training becoming more popular for overall wellness.
• Precision Testing: Just this past year, I've noticed an uptick in friends getting DEXA scans, VO2 max tests, and resting metabolic rate (RMR) assessments. I think we're still early on this one, but I gradually see these tests becoming more mainstream as the tooling gets cheaper plus more compact, and demand for products and services complementary to earlier trends like run clubs and hybrid fitness continues to grow.
• Microplastics Aversion: Microplastics are poised to become the next big personal health concern as public awareness grows quickly, spurred by recent investigations like PlasticList.org, ProPublica’s deep dive into 3M's cover-up and Andrew Huberman’s podcasts on the health risks of plastics. We might start to see more brands advertise low leakage of microplastics in their packaging and products (think Owala and Stanley stainless steel water bottles) as well as new product categories emerge or take off around microplastic reduction (think specialized water filters for skincare routines or single-use cotton face towels). I've started to avoid mixing hot water and plastic bags or containers including plastic tea steepers (apparently, the traditional tea bag leaks a ton of microplastics). This is unfortunately bearish news for one of my favorite cooking methods sous-vide, which involves cooking meats in plastic bags simmering in hot water.

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