Health clubs can become the place to get your lifestyle curated

Future Practice has launched a suite of courses to empower fitness professionals to become wellbeing professionals. Why?
We want fitness professionals to take control of a space where there is currently a vacuum. At the moment 56 per cent of Gen Z are getting health advice from TikTok, because there’s no professional giving it to them. We can’t blame TikTok for that, we can blame the absence of quality provision.

What we’ve got to recognise as a sector is people are already buying wellbeing products to try and fix these problems with no understanding of them whatsoever. That ignorance is creating an enormous boosted market of false products.

If the fitness sector doesn’t step up to wellbeing soon it will fragment and we will be out of the picture, but if we take ownership of recovery, sleep and interventions such as breathwork, health clubs and gyms can become the places to get your lifestyle curated.

Why have you done a course on VO2 max?
This parameter should be tracked and trended as frequently as blood pressure and cholesterol, as it drives the immune system, stress resilience, energetic capability and cognitive clarity.

The fitness industry has pivoted very aggressively towards resistance training and strength work recently, while cardiorespiratory fitness is currently being neglected. People have lost their love of cardio because it has less immediate and obvious effects on the way you look, but there comes a point where there’s a biological maintenance requirement.

Cardiorespiratory fitness is the most predictive biological marker of life expectancy. The Copenhagen study of 125,000 men showed that increasing VO2 max by only one millilitre per kg can extend life expectancy by 45 days and when you scale this up it represents a huge impact (www.hcmmag.com/Copenhagen).

The real interest in longevity is not living longer but retaining functionality longer and the game starts in our 40s. From the age of 40, we lose 10 per cent of VO2 max per decade. If you have a low VO2 max in your 30s and 40s, you’ll be the person who can’t get out of the house in your 70s. If you have a high VO2 max in your 40s, you’re the person who’s going on walking holidays during retirement.

And it’s important for Gen Z too: they look fantastic but have anxiety issues and poor sleep. I would be extremely interested in the correlation between a neglect of cardio-respiratory exercise and the feeling, or increased propensity, for poor mental health.

It’s never too late to improve VO2 max. We’re seeing improvements in people in their 80s and the statistical change in their cardiovascular disease risk from those changes is astronomical, but more importantly they can do stuff they couldn’t do before this.

Fitness professionals can bring about these changes, so if we continue to neglect this parameter it will be a huge oversight. This new training course puts cardio back on the menu with clear, objective markers and brings the most powerful longevity predictor back into the gyms.

This should be the language of every fitness professional in the UK, we think that it should be on the curriculum of personal trainers. Not using this information when there is such robust evidence available is negligent.

Is sleep as important?
Sleep disturbances cause excessive eating, increased cardiovascular risk and a pre-disposition for diabetes. If we want to be preventative as an industry, it’s not enough to just move people, we have to get them well rested too and almost everyone in the country is interested in sleeping better.

Sixty per cent of the UK has sleep issues and at least half of those figures are driven by behaviour, so we identified a space for a pre-clinical consultation to rule out behaviour-led sleep disturbances, such as mis-managing caffeine, alcohol, naps, or the regulation of daily rhythms. We’re talking about tens of millions of people who don’t sleep well because they don’t understand that blue light interferes with melatonin, or don’t even know what melatonin is.

Currently there are no pre-clinical sleep specialists, so we need to empower gyms to sell sleep consultations as part of their offering, which would allow personal trainers to increase their hourly rate. Designed in collaboration with Dr Vicky Pico, an NHS GP and lifestyle specialist, the sleep optimisation course screens sleep behaviours and creates a strategic roadmap for improvement.

How about breathwork?
Working with the breath is a very powerful stress resilience tool and we’re seeing breathwork explode as a concept, but it’s rarely explained.

We partnered with one of the top breath coaches in the country, Jamie Clements, who founded The Breath Space, to create the breathwork course. We go through two types of breathwork: functional breathing to optimise everyday breathing, ensuring it’s not too shallow – not mouth breathing and that the diaphragm is engaged. Secondly, we look at how breathing techniques can be used to regulate the nervous system, so people spend more of the day in a physiologically calm state rather than a stressed one.

What’s the inspiration behind the business skills course?
Building Your Personal Wellbeing Brand is aimed at high-end personal trainers, who are interested in emulating Harry Jameson’s career* working with high-net worth individuals and companies, or becoming brand ambassadors. This is a workshop-based course that helps PTs to identify their brand values, who they would like to represent, which companies reflect and mirror that and how they could engage with them.

How did you decide on the price point?
This is 25 years of clinical knowledge distilled into digital courses, made up of bite-sized chunks and ready to be applied.

We could have made it a premium product and sold it to elite gyms, boutiques and luxury spas, because we know there’s a market there. However, we think every PT in the country should know this, and we’re noticing a shift in interest, so we chose to democratise these teachings and make them available at an affordable price. At least for the time being.

* About Harry Jameson... The Future Practice co-founder has worked as a wellness business consultant with organisation such as Apple and Nike and curated wellness retreat programmes with Four Seasons, Rosewood Hotels and One & Only. His personal clients include celebrities, CEOs and world leaders