This Saturday I attended Fit Retreat Philadelphia. This was a fitness conference hosted by City Fit Girls. The conference was from 9 am to 2 pm. There were exercise classes like running, biking, kick boxing, club cardio, yoga, HIIT, and Belly Dancing every hour. There were also health workshops on the psychology of food, meditation, juicing, body image, healthy shopping and others. I really enjoyed this format of having both exercise classes and workshops to choose from. I would not have been able to work out all day id it were just classes.
There were so many options for how to spend the day. This is what I chose:
9:00 club cardio
10:00 psychology of food
11:00 juicing
12:00 body image
1:00 belly dancing
In addition to the classes and workshop the ticket also included a salad lunch and networking with the vendors. I chatted quite a bit with the vendors of Thinx about their mission to improve the quality of life for girls in Uganda. They asked me to review one of their products so stay tuned for that.
The fitness classes were good but challenging. When we started the club cardio class one of my first thoughts was on no, am I in over my head here? I take zumba regularly but this club cardio was more exercise than dancing. The instructor said for us to do 50 jumping jacks. I wasn't sure I could do them. But I did and I kept up throughout the rest of the class. The belly dancing class was physically easier but a definite challenge to my coordination. It was good to see that I could do other things that were outside of my fitness comfort zone.
Almost 500 calories burned at #FitRetreatPhl
My favorite of the workshops was the psychology of food class. The instructor talked about how to examine all of the areas of our life to see where we were not content. Being dissatisfied with our lives often leads to using food for comfort. We discussed the fact that disordered eating (an unhealthy relationship with food) is often a symptom of being unhappy with other aspects of life. At the end of the workshop the instructor encouraged us to to lead by example and be the kinds of people we want the young girls in our lives to be when they are our age.
Overall Fit Retreat Philly was great. I look forward to going to other City Fit Girls events and the Retreat again next year.
Have you ever attended a Fitness retreat? What was it like? Were you at Fit Retreat Philly?