Every year the American College of Sports Medicine publishes its survey of worldwide fitness trends for the coming year. It predicts top 20 fitness trends in the U.S. and around the world, calling on a host of professionals and stakeholders from the fitness world.
2025’s trends have just dropped, and it’s going to be another massive year for wearable technology. The best smartwatches aside, however, there are some other big movers and shakers that point to a world of personalized, data-driven fitness in your pocket, and a worrying sign for personal trainers.
So which trends are in, and which are out? What are the mainstays of fitness for 2025, and what’s new and exciting? From a survey of personal trainers, coaches, students, researchers, medical professionals, and more, here are the top takeaways from the intersection of fitness and technology.
Wearable technology has been the number one trend in all but two of the last 10 years, and it’s another top spot for 2025. ACSM notes the field of wearable tech “is constantly advancing” and highlights the benefits of the best fitness trackers, smart rings, and more.
But not without issuing a warning, too. ACSM warns “more work is needed to improve concerns of validity, reliability, and data privacy.” Personal training will feature later, but the trends list encourages exercise pros to use wearable tech to support their clients. Interestingly, full-time personal trainers were the only group from the exercise professionals polled in the survey who didn’t list wearable tech as the top-ranked trend.
Mobile exercise apps have continued their surge from 20th in 2023, seventh in 2024, to finally number two in this year’s survey. ACSM reports that some 850 million fitness apps were downloaded by some 370 million users in 2023, and speculates that wearable technology could be fuelling the rise thanks to its complementary nature.
The survey praised the flexibility of mobile training apps, especially for novice exercisers. Indeed, many of the best fitness apps on the market can help you generate an entire workout plan, track your progress, help you with your form, and more. With the advent of AI in apps like the PUSH workout app, the power of these apps to adapt and offer customized training to individuals is greater than ever before
New for 2024, data-driven technology appears at number seven for 2025, thanks to its power to help clients “understand the physiological responses to an exercise stimulus in real-time.”
As exercise professionals leverage metrics like sleep and heart rate variability in training and recovery, they can more readily adjust training in response to these conditions, making exercise safer, especially for people with cardiometabolic conditions.
On-demand exercise classes, which exploded during the pandemic, are back in the top 20 for the first time since 2022. Pre-recorded classes and videos like Apple Fitness Plus or Peloton provide great flexibility to their users because they can be accessed anytime, any place.
More broadly, the re-emergence of on-demand exercise classes could be a sign of the deepening desire for customers to take more control of their own fitness journey, choosing which classes to do and when on their own terms, rather than committing to a workout program at their local gym or the rigors of personal training.
Personal training has been a top 10 trend in the ACSM survey since 2007 but has fallen to 16 for 2025. While the body acknowledges it remains “critical” for those who want effective guidance, the proliferation of remote work and virtual fitness solutions (like those aforementioned classes) is reducing demand.
One suggested solution for personal trainers is integrating hybrid modalities, making personal training more adaptable, personalized, and effective. With the surge of data-powered, personalized, democratized fitness apps and wearables, could we be seeing a drop in the demand for one-to-one personal training? While you get the most personal experience possible from a personal trainer, it often requires significant time and financial commitments, as well as space and equipment.
There’s no guarantee these trends will play out exactly as predicted by ACSM, but if they do, it could be the first wake-up call to an industry of fitness professionals who need to adapt to a changing, connected, and data-driven fitness future.
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