Research for my proposal

Weight issues within young people:

Obesity levels in the UK have more than trebled in the last 30 years and, on current estimates, more than half the population could be obese by 2050.

The number of children aged 13 to 19 having weight loss surgery has risen from one a year in 2000 to 31 in 2009

In 2008 among children aged two to 15, more boys (32%) than girls (24%) met the recommendation to do an hour of activity every day (1).



Risks associated with being overweight:

• Compared with a healthy weight man, an obese man is:

1. five times more likely to develop type 2 diabete
2.  three times more likely to develop cancer of the colon
3. more than two and a half times more likely to develop high blood pressure – a major risk factor for stroke and heart disease (1)

• An obese woman, compared with a healthy weight woman, is:

1. more than four times more likely to develop high blood pressure
2. almost 13 times more likely to develop type 2 diabetes
3. more than three times more likely to have a heart attack (1)

How the industry of fitness has increased:

With the existence of technology it is right to say that most of the population have now became less and less healthier compared to a few years ago. In addition to all the technology which are trapping the humans at home, we also had a massive increase on fast foods production. The rate of obesity has grown massively since 1987. It is said that 72 million Americans, approximately one third of the population are clinically considered as obese. Also in UK,61.7% of the population are either overweight or obese.

Here are some more examples of obesity (1):

UK: 24.9%

Ireland: 24.5%

Spain: 24.1%

Portugal: 21.6%

Germany: 21.3%

Belgium: 19.1%

Austria: 18.3%

Italy: 17.2%

Sweden: 16.6%

France: 15.6%

With all the problems with obesity and being overweight fitness and weight loss has also grown rapidly, for some it even became an addiction. Fitness centers and industries started quite long time ago, since 1970s/80s. However back then fitness was not as important to us as it is now. Exercise those times would be led by running and aerobics. Between the years 1990s and 2000s gym memberships grew however it was not until a few years ago where gym has massively became a home for most people. Its growth number nearly doubling. At the start of the decade there were 16,938 clubs/gyms, by 2008 the number of clubs/gyms went up to 29,636 (1).

When weight lifting first became popular it was only used in Olympics as a sport. This was recognized as an Olympics sport in 1904 and became a regular Olympics sports from 1920. Back in those days weightlifting was not seen as a way to keep fit or bulking up, it was only an Olympics sport (2).

Now most of us do or have tried to do some sort of exercise which includes weightlifting. In other words most of us have tried to start doing gym in order to keep fit/healthy. However not everyone chooses to stay once they started. I mean there are 67% of people which have bought a gym membership and has never used it (3).

Although over half of the people with memberships do not use it we had an estimate of 19 billions memberships renewed in 2008 (3).

Gym is not always about keeping fit and looking good, sometimes it is all about exercising. A question we find hard to answer is whether people would much rather attend gym or just exercise outside.

Exercising outside can have its benefits such as not monthly fees, no waits to use the equipment, no need to travel far to exercise and best of all you can appreciate the nature. The problem with outside training is that it requires dedication and motivation. Because of this the results are not the same as in the gym. In the gym you have a trainer and other people who are there to push for you and motivate you to go to a point in which you can no longer exercise.





References:

1- https://www.franchisehelp.com/industry-reports/fitness-industry-report/
2- http://www.teamusa.org/USA-Weightlifting/Weightlifting101/History-of-Weightlifting
3- http://www.statisticbrain.com/gym-membership-statistics/



Primary Research

In order for us to find specific knowledge as too how people would view our documentary and also how different types of people viewed our documentary we had to create a questionnaire tailored to what we wanted to know. Below are the specific questions and answers we thought were most beneficial and influential to how we went about presenting our documentary. In all honesty I don't believe it made us change our ideas because it was more of a practice task however that being said it may have had minor influences on the things we did subconsciously.






Question 1 was looking into the ages of the people answering since it does have a bearing on results. Everyone that had answered this questionnaire were between the ages of 15 and 24 which although seems restricted this was more or less the types of people we believed would be interested in fitness as a whole.



Question 2 was looking into the gender of those that we were interviewing since this had a bearing on answers. We used the term gender as opposed to other terminology as well as leaving it open so people could label themselves instead of us doing this for them. In the end we had a total of 4 people that skipped the questionnaire but the remaining answers were of 15 listed as male and 12 people listed as female. We can assume that the 4 skipped ones were either male or female since we got our candidates from social sites/groups that were similar to us, regardless of these outliers we had a nice range of both male and female participants which was helpful and provided some insight on the population as a whole.



Question 3 was an important one, we needed to know if the people that were being questioned even watched documentaries since that is what the whole premise was based on. 32/36 people questioned had watched documentaries and that correlated with what my expectations were.



Question 6 was asking the question 'have you heard of a 3 minute wonder?' we needed to know how many people were aware of what it was we were aiming to produce since the following question depended on if people had actually watched or atleast heard of a 3 minute wonder. Only 27.78% of people questioned had actually heard of a 3MW which was pretty surprising.



Question 8 is arguably the most important question asked. We needed to know how viable our production was and in order to know that we had to ask about how interested our potential audience would be in our gym documentary. Almost every respondant answered the question and 24/36 people responded with a positive yes as their answer so from this we could say that 2/3rds of young people would find our production interesting and so I would say it was viable.