After a successful launch last summer the Southsea Fitness Festival will be returning to Castle Field on Saturday 4^th June. The free event organised by the independent fitness facility SWEAT Southsea aims to celebrate and inspire active and healthy lifestyles. 

The organisers have assembled a winning team consisting of local leisure providers including Canoe Lake Leisure, Portsmouth Football Club, Pompey In The Community and Fitness First, all of which are official event partners. 

There’s so many great providers out there and they’ve been really supportive of the Festival and its effort to make Portsmouth a healthier place and to celebrate and inspire active living.”

For those of you who want to get involved on the day and build up a bit of a sweat then there are plenty of FREE activities and classes starting with a special SWEAT Outdoors with their personal training team. Expect an amazing functional workout with everything from tyre flipping, sled dragging and battle ropes combined with the use of the Southsea landscape – the stones, hills and steps.

The local yoga scene has grown massively over the past few years with a wide variety of styles available. Lucy Barlow from Portsmouth Yoga will be offering a free 40 minute session. You can bring your own mat should you wish and beginners are more than welcome to learn first hand how yoga can help you. 

You can find the full timetable of what is on offer at www.fitnessfestivals.com/timetable 

As well as local providers returning to the city is Strong Living PT‘s Shelley Buxey who will be bringing her Hackney HIITsters down from London offering a free HIIT session. If you are not aware of high-Intensity interval training basically, HIIT involves short, intense bursts of exercise with less intense moves or complete rest in between. Essentially, it’s crazy-efficient—which means you could be spending less time in the gym each week while still cashing in on all the fat-burning, metabolism-boosting, and heart-pounding benefits.

The event is family friendly with Canoe Lake Leisure offering free pop-up tennis, Portsmouth In The Community are offering inclusive sports all day and one of the Portsmouth Football Club players making a special appearance!

“We wanted to showcase health and fitness opportunities for everyone regardless of their ability or budget.” Luke Newton (Event Organiser)

Event organiser Luke Newton, explains “We’ve worked hard to ensure the event grows in the right way. There will be healthy eating stands, activities for the whole family such as archery, badminton and volleyball, huge prize giveaways, and classes ranging from HIIT workouts, to ‘Movers’ with John Pounds Centre and ‘Sling Swing’ for the mums and dads with babies and toddlers. We wanted to showcase health and fitness opportunities for everyone regardless of their ability or budget. There’s so many great providers out there and they’ve been really supportive of the Festival and its effort to make Portsmouth a healthier place and to celebrate and inspire active living.”

You don’t have to be in your gym kit to enjoy yourself, there will be plenty of stalls and games where you can win yourself a great prize or you may simply want to learn about some of the leisure facilities available in the city. This is a unique event that you will not find anywhere else in the UK! You can find out more information on their Facebook and Twitter @SouthseaFitFest accounts.