Using Trends Reports to Match Your Members to Industry Trends

In my opinion, trend reports are fun and informative to read, and they certainly give any owner or operator the opportunity to see how and where their facility’s programs rank to industry trends.

Alternatively, trends reports can be confusing and hard to interpret, especially when you try and read them all and attempt to pull all of their findings into one “Top 10” list for your own understanding.

While I still enjoy studying these reports, I realize they are becoming more challenging to interpret. Interpreting these trends reports used to be easier because there were so few of them and they included everything from programming to equipment to compensation.

Today there are trends reports for almost every major fitness association and for stand-alone categories within the industry itself. In fact, I just came across the new “IHRSA Fitness Training Report” in April’s Club Business International magazine. At first I thought, “Oh no, here’s another report I will need to integrate into my understanding of the 2018 trends,” but quickly I realized this was different. It provided me with so much information in a specific area of the industry that is dominating the trends lists: small group training and personal training.

The report also provided a concise demographic breakdown and comparison between the small group training users and the personal training users. The 10 insights presented certainly provided me with new and helpful insight, which I can now immediately apply into my discussions with colleagues and decision makers.

The biggest takeaways from this report are twofold. First, we really must begin with the end in mind, know why we are here as a business and who we want to serve. Is it possible to serve both the baby boomer and millennials under one roof?

And second, is small group training the place where we should focus more attention and resources in order to grow both personal training and traditional group fitness? As a fan of trends reports I appreciate this fresh perspective.

Mo Hagan is vice president of program innovation for GoodLife Fitness and canfitpro.