Home workouts reached peak popularity around 2020 – with many workout regiments going viral due to how little time and resources they required, but how many benefits they had to offer. Following that trend, many personal trainers started offering online sessions instead of in-person ones, to purely follow the demands of the market, and many sporting brands oriented their lines towards providing home-workout exercise equipment. However, nowadays it seems that in-person gym sessions are returning to pre-pandemic levels, which begs the question – are home workouts no longer cutting it?
The first thing to emphasize here is that home workouts were just one of many trends that periodically hit the fitness community, before decreasing in popularity, and becoming overshadowed by a new trend. Of course, this doesn’t mean that home workouts aren’t effective, or useful – most often, said trends go viral precisely because they are extremely practical and effective in achieving various fitness goals, but not many people know about them.
The ongoing popularity of supplements is another great example of such trends – with more and more people increasing their protein intake through supplements, adding creatine to their diet, and more. The growing steroids Canada market, or the beta-alanine one, just serves to prove the same point. Supplements are an amazing way to keep control of your metabolism or your protein intake, as well as a great way of balancing out nutrients that you might not easily fit within your usual diet. However, people don’t necessarily know this – so every once in a while, the sporadic realization of how effective supplements could be takes the internet by storm.
So, in a way, home workouts haven’t really failed us – they haven’t stopped being useful or practical but have simply passed as a viral trend. They still offer immense convenience, and flexibility, when compared to gym sessions – and are a great way for shy newcomers to experience the benefits of active exercise, before joining an actual fitness community. Additionally, home workouts are still immensely cheaper than gym sessions – even when accounting for potential equipment one would need to purchase to have a full-blown exercise experience at home.
However, a good reason behind many people returning to in-person gym sessions is the fitness community: the ability to work with trainers – and by that, ensure that you have good form, push yourself hard enough, and achieve continuous progress. On the basic level, it’s much easier to make excuses, skip workouts, or do the bare minimum when exercising within your own home – and, sometimes, achieving the same results as you would in the gym, is much harder due to lack of necessary equipment. However, on a more complex level – the biggest selling-point of gyms is the community you get to interact with.
Even if you don’t really talk to people at the gym, you still benefit from their energy – from seeing someone achieve the goals you hope to achieve, or witnessing the amount of dedication, and resilience people show in their paths to improve their wellbeing.
All in all, home workouts haven’t fully disappeared from the radar, but have simply been replaced with newer trends in the fitness industry. They still offer the same benefits they always did – it just seems that people prefer learning from each other, working with each other, and benefiting off of each other’s energy.
