Future Practice has launched a suite of courses designed to enable fitness professionals to train as wellbeing professionals. They will cover areas such as longevity, breathwork, recovery and sleep.

Three new wellness courses are available: Sleep Optimisation; Practical Breathwork for Lifestyle Professionals and Indirect VO2 max and Lifestyle Coaching.

“We want fitness professionals to take control of a space where there's currently a vacuum,” says Future Practice co-founder, Oliver Patrick. “At the moment 56 per cent of Gen Z are getting health advice from TikTok, because there are no professionals giving it to them.

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

Patrick says having good VO2 max is a gamechanger in terms of longevity and healthspan and that it’s important to get people of all ages back into cardio workouts: “VO2 max drives the immune system, stress resilience, energetic capability and cognitive clarity. This parameter should be tracked and trended as frequently as blood pressure and cholesterol, because it is the most predictive biological marker of life expectancy.

“People have lost their love of cardio because it has less effect on the way you look, but there comes a point where there's a biological maintenance requirement.”

A study of 125,000 people showed that increasing VO2 max by even one millilitre can extend life expectancy by 45 days. However, from the age of 40, we lose 10 per cent of VO2 max per decade, which makes it even more important that middle-aged people keep up the cardio.

“If you have a high VO2 max in your 40s, you're the person who's going on walking holidays during retirement,” says Patrick. “But if you have a low VO2 max in your 30s and 40s, you will be the person who can't get out of the house in their 70s. Fitness professionals are the people who can bring about these changes, so if we continue to neglect this parameter that’s a huge oversight.”

Patrick says there's also a lack of expertise around sleep and breathwork, so fitness professionals have the opportunity to claim this space. PTs could also increase their hourly rate if they're empowered to sell sleep consultations as part of their service.

“Sleep disturbances cause excessive eating, increased cardiovascular risk and a pre-disposition for diabetes,” he says. “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 is interested in sleeping better.”

Breathwork is a hugely powerful stress resilience tool but many people lack the understanding of how to utilise it for this purpose and don't optimise their breathing in everyday life. Future Practice partnered with one of the UK’s top breath coaches, Jamie Clements, to create its breathwork course, which covers functional and therapeutic breathing.

It’s common in the industry for trends to start at the premium end and trickle down, but Future Practice has chosen to do the opposite, pricing the courses so they're widely affordable, starting at £179.

“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,” says Patrick.

Read the full interview with Oliver Patrick in the upcoming issue of HCM and listen to Patrick’s insights at the all-keynote HCM Summit on 24 October. You can book tickets now.

FOOTNOTE

HCM has been predicting a rebirth in cardio. Find out more in HCM's Fitness Foresight report in the HCM Handbook here.