The Next Big Thing In .Fitness

Sarah Holt gives a potted history of workout crazes and uncovers a new way for small fitness business to stand out from the crowd…

Type fitness into google and you get 198 million results. The search engine listings are stuffed with sites for personal trainers, gyms, weight loss clubs, health food companies and fitness magazines. Then, around the 25th page of the results, you get to news articles about the world of sport.

Fitness experts keep reinventing the wheel. Every few months there’s a new craze that claims to get you fitter, faster than the last.

The dog-eat-dog-ness of the fitness industry really took off with Zumba, with its strapline ‘ditch the workout join the party’. This dance fusion class went viral in 2010, reaching 90,000 locations in 110 countries around the world.

Next came hula fitness. Unlike Zumba, this new fitness routine didn’t have a registered trademark. However, that didn’t stop hundreds of dance schools and gyms starting hoop classes at the start of 2011.

2012 was the year of the boot camp. Businesses all over the country started up, offering extreme military-style workout sessions, outdoors. If you weren’t sick at some point during the class, you weren’t working hard enough. The boot camp phenomenon reached its ascendency in the summer of 2012, when the Tough Mudder challenge arrived in the UK from America. The company who runs this extreme 12-mile assault course challenge is now worth $70 million.

The following year Soul Cycle hit the headlines. This craze mated a spinning class with inspirational life coaching. The 24 outlets in the USA attracted more than 5,000 people every day and celebrities like Chelsea Clinton and Lady Gaga were linked to it. In the UK it appeared as Psycle.

So far, there’s a shortlist of workout regimes that could still count as the craze of 2014. There’s Pound, in which exercisers constantly drum with specially-made weighted drum sticks called Ripstix as well as isometric exercises to sculpt muscle and burn up to 900 calories an hour. Then there’s climbercise, in which class-goers utilise a climbing wall to get fit.

All this, and we haven’t even touched on the home workout Insanity craze or the hotly tipped UGIfit or ballet BARRE.

What all of the above servers to highlight is how hard it is to stand out from the competition in the world of fitness. New workouts are always hot on the heels of the current trends. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next big thing was some sort of extreme skipping or bounce-based class.

And this is where .fitness comes in. The newly release web address ending makes it easier for you to get a web address that most accurately reflects your business. It also identifies you as a serious member of the fitness industry from the moment your website name appears in the search engine results.

.fitness web addresses are available from UK2 for as little as £23.99 – that’s less than a single Soul Cycle class.