Health and fitness festivals

Depending on your personal preferences, you might be looking forward to spending a few days sleeping in a tent in a field this summer as you join the millions that will attend summer musical festivals across the country this year. But the chances are you haven’t got tickets booked for a health and fitness festival, right? Well they could just be the next big thing for our community. 

The idea of any festival is simple: get a large group of like-minded individuals to congregate and celebrate their mutual appreciation for whatever the festival is in aid of. So a rock festival is full of rock fans, a metal festival is full of metal fans and, unsurprisingly, a health and fitness festival is full of health and fitness fans.

There is one glaringly obvious difference though. If you are off to Glastonbury this summer then you will expect to see your favourite artists on a stage performing your favourite songs. The same cannot be said of health and fitness festivals. In reality they are obviously far less common, so each one is fairly unique. Be:FIT is a big one in the UK for example but sorry to the guys out there, it’s exclusively for women.

I guess it is like having a cross between Comic Con and Glastonbury. So you can expect guest speakers and the chance to meet loads of people with huge amounts of expertise. And as with all festivals it is a chance to get a look at the up and coming. Every week you will see a new product jump onto the market and have no idea whether or not it is actually going to do anything for you. Well health and fitness festivals are a great place to sample these products and speak to people who have been using them for a long time.

So what do you actually get for your money? Well each festival will be unique and that’s what we want. But don’t expect it to be like any other festival that you have been to before. For starters alcohol will probably be a big no-no, so don’t even think about it. And it won’t be like a spa weekend, this is about doing real work. Obviously you can do as much or as little as you want but just expect there to be people who live and breathe to train and they won’t have any time for holding back.

You don’t have to give up everything that you love about your favourite musical festivals though. So you can still get a group of friends together and go as a whole. And most workouts are done to loud music, I guess to try and give off that festival impression.

Will they ever be as big as musical festivals? It’s just too early to tell but it isn’t like they are in direct competition anyway. You can enjoy music and the gym and in fact most people tend to combine the two in some capacity. It seems obvious that fitness festivals are going to grow in popularity and inevitably more of them will start happening. As fas as I’m concerned, anything like this that promotes living a healthy lifestyle is a positive thing.

So if you can, try and get to a fitness festival if you can find one near you and if you can’t, keep looking out because they are bound to crop up somewhere near you in the next few years!