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The science behind super foods: are they really super? The term ‘super food’ has become a popular buzzword in the language of food and health. Why? Because it’s healthy? Super foods give a  positive reaction to the body. They say it can give a healing effect. Super foods are pure and without additional ingredients, that’s why these products are often more expensive.

Every year there is a list with the new fitness trends for the coming year. The most popular list is coming from the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM). The research is coming out of 3800 fitness professionals worldwide. 

In the book The future of health and fitness, an impressive group of European Professors explain how to get more Europeans active by 2025.  The book is a must-read document to understand the problem of inactivity and the relationship to health and fitness and how to make a plan for improvements. In terms of health, several diseases are discussed like overweight and obesity. The table below shows the huge amount of overweight and obese persons per country.

Every year the SGMA investigates fitness trends in the United States of America. Usually, the US is ahead of other parts of the world when in comes to fitness. According to the SGMA, the biggest trend in 2011 was walking for fitness, based on a national survey with 38.742 interviews, completed by 15.038 individuals.

December 2013 comes with a special offer for you! Buy the book The State of Research in the global fitness Industry or the book Member Retention in Fitnessclubs and receive The EHFA Retention Report 2013 for free* (which has a € 18,- value).

One of the most used key words in the global fitness industry is motivation. But what is motivation? And how can we understand the principles behind motivation? Lets first define three important concepts:

Every business prospers if it can keep customers loyal for a long time, if not for life. Improving the retention of customers also helps improve the retention of the key staff.

The fitness industry is a trendy world. Trends come and go. When you count all the trends that have been launched globally in the last twelve months, you will get lost. Trends help our industry a lot, but there are cons as well.

When people get older, their level of physical activity and exercise decreases dramatically. An impressive longitudinal study proved that people exercise 55% less comparing the same group on the age of 13 to the age of 27. So inactivity becomes a bigger risk to health when people get older. How come? 

In our industry we often discuss retention. In fact, mostly we refer to member retention. But, we could also discuss employee retention in general or retention of specific groups of employees. For example, from practice in the industry we hear that some clubs have a turnover of sales reps of 200 to 300% per year. Wow!