The Globe and Mail

2. People want heavenly bodies

In October, celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton combined our twin obsessions with fitness and the stars, launching FitPerez.com, a website dedicated to the diets, workouts and “hawtness” of celebrities. Perez certainly wasn’t the first blogger to capitalize on the formula, but he was the most high-profile. With the proliferation of similar sites, it seems that as we navigate our way to buff bods, more of us are looking to the stars.

3. The gender divide is still strong in sports

Courtney Greer, a 17-year-old soccer player from Waterloo, Ont., scored a victory for gender equality in sports in April when she forced the Ontario Federation of School Athletic Associations to change its rule banning girls from playing on boys’ teams unless a girls’ team does not exist. The victory meant Greer could play defence on her school’s boys’ soccer team. But bodies that oversee high-school sports in British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan said they would continue to bar girls from competing against the opposite sex.

4. There is no end to new types of yoga

Hot yoga. Couples yoga. Hip-hop yoga. The list goes on. And on. And just when you thought it couldn’t get any longer, along comes ganja yoga. Purists may object that smoking reefer interferes with yoga’s higher principles, but practitioners claim it heightens awareness and enhances the yogic experience. Hey, whatever you say, Cheech.

5. Dudes diet, too

George Costanza a weight-loss spokesman? Actually, it made perfect sense when Jason Alexander joined Jenny Craig as a company spokesperson in January. Unlike the handful of other men who have pitched diets (most of them former pro athletes), Alexander is just a regular schlub losing the battle of the bulge. In his new role, Alexander is hoping to dispel the notion – crazy, we know – that only women diet.

6. Exergaming has grown up

The advent of the Nintendo Wii in 2006 was supposed to usher in a new era in how we exercise. Then people realized you could break more of a sweat playing Super Mario than you could with most exergames. But with new titles this year, including NFL Training Camp, Your Shape Fitness Evolved and Jillian Michaels Fitness Ultimatum 2010, exergames finally made us start feeling the burn.

7. The other shoe has yet to drop on barefooting

No other controversy fired up runners quite as much as whether or not to wear shoes. Thought the shoes-versus-no shoes debate was settled around the time shoes were invented? Hardly. Ignited by Christopher McDougall’s bestseller Born to Run and fuelled by studies such as one published in the journal Nature in January, barefooting divided the running community, with some calling it a great way to avoid injury while others called it plain stupid.

8. People want their butts kicked

Pilates classes are going the way of jazzercise at mainstream gyms. Why? They’re too easy. The trend is toward high-intensity workouts, such as boot camps, or higher-energy fare such as zumba, a dance fitness program. Fewer people at fitness clubs seem willing to put the time in to learn the technical demands of Pilates, judging by the diminishing number of classes. They just want to get their sweat on, and have fun doing it.

9. Lower your expectations – you might perform better

No one feels the pressure to perform like an Olympic athlete. But at the Vancouver Games, snowboarder Shaun White proved what’s possible when you just go for it. Told by his coach to just “have some fun” when he dropped in to the half-pipe, White did just that and nailed a Double McTwist 1260, one of the hardest moves in snowboarding (and one that will guarantee him a spot on “Best of” sports highlight reels for a long time to come). Plus he got to take home a gold medal.

10. Young sailors are going too far to set records

Laura Dekker unfurled an international controversy last year when it was learned the then 13-year-old was planning to sail solo around the world. Despite objections from authorities, a Dutch family court gave Dekker the go-ahead in July. A month earlier, Abigail Sunderland, a 16-year-old from California, had to be rescued at sea after a failed attempt to set the record to become the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe. Enough teens have tried to sail their way into the history books that the World Sailing Speed Record Council and Guinness World Records have decided no longer to recognize records for “youngest” sailors in an attempt to quell their dangerous ambitions.