A whole fitness trend study but not one word about indoor rowing

October 10, 2005 08:00 AM US Eastern Timezone


IDEA Health & Fitness Association Announces Results of 2005 Programs & Equipment Survey, Revealing Latest Exercise and Equipment Trends


SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 10, 2005--IDEA Health & Fitness Association:


-- Tenth Annual Survey Reinforces Popularity of Personal Training, Strength-Based Programs, Yoga and Pilates Fusion, Core Conditioning and Nutrition Assessment while Revealing Increasing use of Elliptical Trainers, Balance Equipment and Weighted Bars


IDEA Health & Fitness Association, the leading membership organization of health and fitness professionals worldwide with nearly 20,000 members in more than 80 countries, has released the results of its 2005 IDEA Fitness Programs & Equipment Survey, demonstrating the continued adoption of diversified personal training programs while highlighting increased use of small equipment, such as stability balls, balance boards and foam rollers.


The tenth annual survey polled nearly 300 IDEA business and program directors across North America, representing a cross-section of large and small health clubs, personal training gyms, specialty studios, college campuses, corporate and hospital fitness centers as well as park and recreation programs. This year's survey, including valuable data on more than 64 fitness programs and activities as well as 26 categories of equipment, showed a continuing upward trend in a variety of programs tailored for beginner, intermediate and advanced clientele. Regardless of location, 85 percent of respondents offer programs designed to attract the inactive person or new exerciser. On average, managers estimate that 40 percent of their participants are beginners. With 71 percent reporting that their clients stay with the business for one year or longer, it's clear that IDEA business members are coming up with and maintaining creative ways to keep exercisers motivated and dedicated to their fitness regimes.


According to Kathie Davis, executive director and co-founder of IDEA Health & Fitness Association, the 2005 survey culminates a decade of industry leadership in researching and assessing the latest trends and fitness fads. "For 10 years, we've been at the forefront of the fitness industry, following the rise and fall of a wide array of programs and equipment that have helped exercisers of all levels improve and maintain their quality of life," she says. "Over the years, we have watched the industry broaden and expand to accommodate many different fitness levels and age groups, so now there truly is something for everyone -- kids, seniors and people of all ages who want to customize their fitness activities to their individual interests and potential."


Among the more noteworthy programming trends uncovered in the 2005 survey are:


-- Group strength training, personal training and Pilates are the three most popular programs.


-- Personal training maintains its status as the No. 1 program, with 88 percent of respondents offering all types of personal training programs. In contrast, 66 percent of the 1996 survey respondents offered personal training yet also reported that only about 25 percent of their clients participated in personal training programs.


-- Since 1998, IDEA has been following the rise of two-client or three-to-five client partner personal training. Both areas show aggressive growth, with two-client classes rising by 29 percentage points over the years for a total of 71 percent in 2005. At the same time, small group fitness classes of three-to-five clients have risen from 33 percent in 1998 to 43 percent in 2005.


-- Enhanced mind-body programs that combine yoga and Pilates with one another or with strength training continued to gain popularity. More than half of those surveyed (60 percent) are merging yoga and Pilates with one another or a traditional exercise format. In looking back, yoga has enjoyed consistent appeal over the past decade, with 31 percent of the 1996 respondents including a yoga class on their weekly program rosters. Today, 66 percent of the survey respondents hold regular yoga classes.


-- Nutrition assessment is another growing area with more than half of the survey respondents offering some level of evaluation. However, overall lifestyle coaching, most notably in the areas of stress management, weight management and smoking cessation, has declined steadily since IDEA started following this area in 1998. Currently, it now is offered mostly in corporate and hospital facilities.


-- Classes based on urban street or funk dance have surpassed traditional ballroom dancing, probably because of appeal to younger exercisers.


-- Core conditioning classes are offered by more than 63 percent of the survey's respondents.


-- Boot camps, involving both indoor and outdoor exercises, continue to carve out a niche, with indoor boot camps offered by 35 percent and outdoor classes by 16 percent of the respondents.


-- Other programs on the rise include indoor cycling, up seven points from the previous year for a total of 45 percent; kids-specific fitness, up a point from 2004 for a total of 41 percent; and boxing-based and kickboxing programs, up six points for a total of 48 percent.


-- Step aerobic classes continue to be held by nearly 60 percent of all respondents, despite a downward trend in high-, low- and mixed-impact classes over the past decade.


On the equipment side, a variety of interesting trends also emerged, including:


-- Tools for core conditioning, such as stability balls and fitness equipment, are used in almost all fitness settings. In fact, stability-ball classes are held by 58 percent of the survey respondents.


-- Treadmills, elliptical trainers and free weights are the three most essential pieces of equipment identified most often by respondents.


-- The use of cable machines continues to gain traction in most fitness settings.


-- Elliptical trainers, which are used by 74 percent of the respondents; have overtaken stair climbers, still widely available by 64 percent of IDEA members, and treadmills are still going strong at 76 percent of the facilities.


-- The use of stability and balance equipment, which was surveyed for the second time, is growing at a fast pace with Bosu(R), discs, wobble boards and balance boards employed by almost half of the participants.


-- Borrowed from sports conditioning and rehabilitation programs, balance equipment (70 percent) and foam rollers/small balls (64 percent) rapidly are gaining popularity.


"As part of IDEA's ongoing mission to 'Inspire the World to Fitness,' we have remained committed to being among the first to offer insight while evaluating how the latest program and equipment trends are shaping our industry," adds Davis. "As we look back over the past 10 years, we realize that our surveys have helped scores of IDEA members and equipment manufacturers address the growing and diverse fitness requirements."


IDEA members can request the full 2005 IDEA Fitness Programs & Equipment Survey for a nominal fee by calling 1-800-999-4332, ext 7.


About IDEA Health & Fitness Association


IDEA Health & Fitness Association is the world's leading membership organization of health and fitness professionals, with nearly 20,000 members in more than 80 countries. Since 1982, IDEA has provided health and fitness professionals with pertinent information, educational opportunities, career development programs and industry leadership while helping them enhance the quality of life worldwide through safe, effective fitness and lifestyle programs. For more information on IDEA events, publications, educational products, member services or other activities, visit www.ideafit.com.

Xeno Muller, Olympic gold and silver medalist, indoor rowing, rowing technique.

A thought about great wins in an eight and winning in the single scull

I was really happy winning the Eastern Sprint Regatta in the men's eight as a freshman in 1992. At the time, I was new and excited about the US school system and I had greatly enjoyed our coach Scott Roop and a couple walk on rowers who completed the first Frosh Eight.

So to answer the question... When you like the people in the eight, victory is phenomenal.

Quite in the contrary I was bound to the single scull because I was a Swiss kid living in France during my early rowing years. I was looking for an identity and decided that rowing was going to do that. When on walks in the forest of Fontainebleau, with my family's late great dane, Infanta, I would visualize myself to tears in imagening myself winning the Olympic gold in the single scull against Thomas Lange (he is a friend of mine now). I had a lot of emotions about competition and there was not one day that I did not think over a hundred thoughts about training and making the dream reality. I am not a selfish person, and I would convince myself that I would bring great joy to others if I clear the field during the olympic final in 1992 to conquer gold in Barcelona. It happened four years later. Four years of maturing, changing coaches for the better moving to California and meeting my wife. I can tell you that when I crossed the finish line in Georgia on Lake Lanier, I was not immediatley euphoric. I crossed the line unaware of the noise around me. Certain I had won because i counted the boats in the last two hundred and fifty meters. I kissed the sky because of my late father, Peter. I saluted my family members on the left handside and I told myself, bloody h*** you did it. At the end it is you and yourself in the single scull, no other to say "we did it". What has this taught me about myself now: I want to become successful in business by making other people healthier and happier. I want to be there for my family every step of the way, there is nothing like sharing your success with others. I know you got more than you bargained for by asking the question, but I felt inspired to write while my wife and a couple friends of ours were singing songs on our XBOX kareoke.

Keep on rowing and stay alive a long time your loved ones need you around, my dad passed away at age 50.

XENO

Xeno Muller, Olympic gold and silver medalist, indoor rowing, rowing technique.

Good advice from Runnersweb.com

"I made it through my workout; therefore I ate and drank enough. "

There is a big difference between what is optimal and what you can get by on.
I often see athletes gravitate towards the latter. Dehydration raises
heart rate and lowers endurance. Glycogen depletion leaves you with
little energy for high intensity work. Not eating or drinking enough
degrades your performance. You may be able to complete the work out,
but you could have pushed harder, gone faster, and accomplished more if
you had followed a good fueling and hydration plan. The longer your
training session, the more important this becomes.

"Close enough is good enough."

Training requires precision. For example,
the difference between a good aerobic capacity workout and a
non-productive one can be a few heartbeats and seconds. In order for
adaptation to occur, the body has to have a new stress level placed on
it. This means breaking new ground. If you apply the same level of
stress, or less, you will not get faster. The nearer you are to your
goal race, and as work out intensity goes up, the more important this
becomes. Athletes are often surprised when I tell them their workout
did not accomplish much because they were slightly below or even above
where they should have been. They may have worked hard and were very
fatigued, but did not have that last little push that to take them to
the next level.

Xeno Muller, Olympic gold and silver medalist, indoor rowing, rowing technique.

Circuit Training Story!

Posted: October 6, 2005


Science of Sport: What I Learned About Training From Uncle Bud


By Owen Anderson, Ph. D. (Copyright © 2004-2005)


When you are young, it is not necessary to have an idol. Sometimes, though, it helps.


At the age of 12, my cynosure was my uncle Bud. Technically, his name was Raymond J. Anderson, but Bud was better, like new growth, sprouting.


I loved him because of his approving smile, because he listened to me, asked me what I really wanted to do. He was 20 years more into the salad than my dad and stood in nicely for my uninterested brother.


He broke my heart at a baseball game when he said I had a slow swing, but I figured it was just like the game - he got two more strikes. When he asked if I would work on his farm during the summer, I changed instantly from a useless kid into a happy hand.


Drenched daily by the Iowa sun, my skin turned the color of cork. I walked the bean fields searching for errant corn, marched the maize meadows for eloping soy. I drove the Farmall and John Deere, dug post holes, cleaned out silos. I hand-milked the cows at 12-hour intervals, probed beneath surprisingly vicious chickens for warm brown eggs, poured fresh milk into troughs for frenzied pigs. Bud and I took 15-minute naps on the porch after ham-sandwich lunches and checked the box on the gravel road each afternoon for the Des Moines Register, our only - rather feeble - connection to the world outside our viridescent parabola of grain.


I didn't learn about the loft in the barn until August, when the hay, goldening in the field, became just crisp enough for Bud's blades. Bud showed me how to climb the ladder built into the interior wall and taught me to place my hands on the rim of the single, square loft entry so that I could vault into the warm, hazy, dry-grass-scented space, somehow avoiding what seemed to be an inevitable 30-foot plummet right back to the bottom.


When Bud went to Storm Lake for supplies, I pushed bales around until I had three hay-walled rooms set up in my newfound mansard - a library, with assorted dime football novels arranged on a straw shelf, an entertainment center to host the Johnson girls when they visited from the adjacent farm, and a hidden vault into which I could retreat on bad days, accompanied by a few barn cats and an occasional, extremely wary rat. This sepulcher, entered only by means of a hidden tunnel, was an especially good place to be when Bud was entertaining thoughts about undertaking certain, particularly odious jobs - like a thorough cleaning of the chicken coop.


Surprisingly, my hideaway became the venue for my first lesson about physical training. Early one morning, my friend Dean arrived at Bud's place, a tell-tale sign that hard work was about to take place. Bud instructed us to take positions in the loft, and soon he drove the first wagon-load of hay into the yard below. Dean was a bit top-heavy, and so it fell upon me to race down to the wagon, lower a large vise-like apparatus with two claws onto a huge mass of hay, and then rush back up the ladder and into the loft, in time to help Dean pull the hay conglomerate, by means of ropes and pulleys through an upper-story window and thus into our alcove. The hay was guided into position, the claws released, the vise sent back down, and I madly scrambled down the ladder in order to re-encounter the strange device in the wagon. The number of reps of this activity appeared to be infinite, given Bud's penchant for prolonged work and the large amount of land he had set aside for hay. In short, I spent several days rushing back and forth, climbing and descending, attaching and un-attaching, until the loft was nearly full and my three rooms were obliterated.


Yes, it was my first circuit workout; I was moving from place to place, engaging in a series of different exertions. The effect on my fitness was immediate. Suddenly, I began covering the one-mile trail to the pasture in record time, and Bud's jaw dropped one day when he saw me sprint out to seize the Register. I had become both very fatigue-proof and very fast.


Of course, I had no idea that my wagon-to-loft circuit training was responsible for transforming me, but transform me it did. Several years ago, when I read a scientific study which linked circuit training with improvements in lactate threshold, I instantly recalled the circuits I carried out for Bud and understood for the first time what had happened to me during that unforgettable summer.


I have been a huge fan of circuits ever since. They are interesting, fun workouts to complete, and the scientific research suggests that - in addition to lifting lactate threshold - circuits may also improve running economy, enhance fatigue-resistance, promote strength, and even volumize vVO2max. With so many positive effects, circuit training is a great way to begin one's overall training program (with about two circuit sessions per week for four to six weeks). Strange as it may seem to many runners, circuits make more sense than just going out and running miles during the early phases of your training.


Yes, I love "wimpy" circuit workouts, during which various parts of the body are tweaked in succession, giving specific muscle groups a bit of a break between challenges. For example, an upper-body exertion might be followed by a lower-body effort, followed by a core maneuver, followed by a running segment, and so on, so that any one group of specific muscles gets some recovery time within each circuit. Such combinations, although somewhat simpering, have certainly been linked with strong advances in fitness, and so we can't throw them away.


However, raw, intense, searing fatigue is one of the very best stimulators of fitness advancement, and so I also love the red-hot circuits which hit a particular muscle group, especially a collection of sinews which are really important for running, over and over again. For example, it's cool to hit squats, followed by lunges, followed by step-ups, followed by squats with presses, followed by a challenging 800-meter run, within a ciruit. Yes, the quads and hammies will protest a lot. But - their cries will turn into sweet music on race day. Their muscle fibers will be packed with mitochondria, buffers, and aerobic enzymes, the kinds of things which make fatigue go away during races. They'll also be controlled by a nervous system which knows how to recruit just the right collections of motor units for efficient running when fatigue is on the near-horizon.


The specific details of circuit training, including the exact exercises to utilize and the numbers of reps and circuits to complete, have been covered in various issues of Running Research News. To learn more about circuit work, simply visit our brand-new web site (see the URL below) and plug the word "circuit" into the Search-Archive box. You'll find the key articles you need to circuit-train properly. And when you PR in an upcoming race after carrying out several weeks of circuit training, please don't thank me - simply offer a benediction to Bud.


P. S. The RRN business office has autorized me to tell you that anyone who spends $100 or more in our new on-line store between now and October 15 will receive, absolutely free, one of our Malibu Running Camp T-Shirts. That's a deal which is hard to pass up, especially since my daughter, Sasha Balfany, designed the shirts so beautifully. The shirts can also be autographed, upon request. To visit the store, simply go to our web site and click on the STORE button. You'll find lots of things to help your running.

Xeno Muller, Olympic gold and silver medalist, indoor rowing, rowing technique.

Rowing to equip an ER in the UK

3 October 2005

DAD PUTS OAR IN FOR HOSPITAL

A BIG-HEARTED dad raised £5000 for a hospital - after roping in Reporting Scotland newswoman Jackie Bird to help out.


David Collie's twin daughters Rachel and Louise spent 10 weeks in special care at Glasgow's Princess Royal Maternity unit after being born three months prematurely.


David, of Rutherglen, near Glasgow, set up a rowing machine at East Kilbride's shopping centre.


And dozens of shoppers rowed more than 70,000 miles in six hours to raise the cash towards a new incubator.


Civil servant David, 53, said: "I have met Jackie a few times and got to know that she was really sporty. So I plucked up the courage to ask her if she'd come along and row.


"She was great. She held the girls and wished us well with our efforts. She wasn't a bad rower either."


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David added: "Without the equipment in the hospital's care unit, my girls wouldn't be here today. We are very lucky that they made it through.

Xeno Muller, Olympic gold and silver medalist, indoor rowing, rowing technique.