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The Global Health and Fitness Industry at a Glance: Fast, Fit, Flexible, Functional, Funny, Fashionable and Fanatic

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The Rise and Size of the Fitness Industry in Europe

Abstract

Over the past half century, participation in fitness has developed as one of the fastest growing forms of physical activity, especially in economically advanced countries. Nowadays, participation in fitness is an integral part of contemporary lifestyle as for millions of people around the world fitness has become a common practice in their daily life. Accordingly, fitness and health services have expanded tremendously given the high demand for fitness participation. Employees are catering to the needs of millions of fitness customers in many thousands of clubs and studios worldwide.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In two well-founded BBC documentaries, namely ‘The Men Who Made Us Fat’ (2012) and ‘The Men Who Made Us Thin’ (2013), investigative reporter Jacques Peretti respectively traces those responsible for revolutionising our eating habits and those making a fortune from people’s desire to become thin (see www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01k0fs0 and www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b038913v).

  2. 2.

    MEASURE stands for Meeting for European Sport Participation and Sport Culture Research. It is a network under the umbrella of the European Association for Sociology of Sport (EASS). It consists of social scientists and statisticians with an interest in sports participation issues, in particular the measurement and comparability of sports participation between countries and through different time intervals. MEASURE was founded in Leuven in 2010 by social sports scientists from both the KU Leuven and the Mulier Institute.

  3. 3.

    Most of the datasets that were used for this purpose comprise EU countries. If the country does not belong to the EU, the respective indicator is left out of the fact sheet, or instead another (national) dataset is used to fill this gap. As all EU datasets relate to 2019 or earlier, the United Kingdom is still included.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are much indebted to Eric Vandenabeele, director of Fitness.be, who was so kind to provide the authors with the necessary material and publications in order to be able to create Tables 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 included in this chapter.

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  1. Policy in Sports & Physical Activity Research Group, KU Leuven, Louvain, Belgium

    Jeroen Scheerder & Kobe Helsen

  2. University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Hanna Vehmas

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  1. Jeroen Scheerder
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  2. Hanna Vehmas
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Correspondence to Jeroen Scheerder .

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  1. KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Jeroen Scheerder

  2. University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Hanna Vehmas

  3. KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Kobe Helsen

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Scheerder, J., Vehmas, H., Helsen, K. (2020). The Global Health and Fitness Industry at a Glance: Fast, Fit, Flexible, Functional, Funny, Fashionable and Fanatic. In: Scheerder, J., Vehmas, H., Helsen, K. (eds) The Rise and Size of the Fitness Industry in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53348-9_1

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