WellFest

Great event! Can’t wait to see what they have in store for us in 2016!

It’s really about time that something like this turned up in the Irish festival scene. The city has become much more health aware in the last couple of years and it was perfect timing.
I have to say for the first year of the festival I was pretty impressed with how much they managed to pull together and the scale of it.
Herbert Park was the perfect backdrop and thankfully it was a reasonably dry, warm day for the events.
It was such a relaxing atmosphere– I got an amazing, beautiful salad from Natasha’s living foods and sat to enjoy on one of the big comfy beanbags they had scattered around one part of the field. Sitting doing some people watching, you’d nearly fall asleep it was so comfy!
I didn’t get involved with any of the classes or sessions but I chatted to a few people who did and they really enjoyed them! I did get to hear some of the talks going on in one tent and I was pretty impressed by them. The yoga area seemed to be a very popular option, with queues lining up for almost the whole day. There was more wasted space on the other side of the field by the main stage, so perhaps they could reshuffle the lay out for next year and give more space for the yoga classes.
There were loads of vendors bringing interesting products, samples being given out and some great food options.
I’d definitely be interested to see where they take it next year!

Great event with plenty of different options to go see, foods to taste and exercises to get involved with. Only thing I didn’t come across was a dietician. Would possibly be beneficial to have qualified and registered dieticians to answer nutrition based questions.
There’s so much conflicting information out there about what is right and what is wrong so could be really good to have qualified personnel on site to help bust myths… Myth busting Dietician or something along those lines

There is a LOT to like about Ireland’s first fitness & wellbeing festival, most of all is the fact that there’s never really been something like this in Ireland. Held in the completely transformed Herbert Park, there was a feeling in the air that, yes this is strange and unusual, but that it was also the beginning of something that feels perfectly on point for modern day Ireland.
First off, congratulations to the organisers for putting together something like this in IRELAND. The weather was completely fine but the gamble these guys were taking was pretty intense. With normal, boozed fuelled music festivals, if it starts raining then you just lash on more booze and numb your way out of the weather. This wouldn’t have been an option at Wellfest with the strongest substance going being coffee or some healthy red bull alternatives, not quite enough to make you forget about any rain that could have happened. Thankfully the weather produced the goods.
A full range of workshops from yoga to TRX training awaits anyone brave enough to get sporty in front of hundreds of others, and surprisingly everyone was totally jumping in. It was actually a really cool experience watching so many people just forget themselves a little and start joining in on workshops with complete strangers. The TRX training was unlike anything I would normally do but I’m thankful I got to try it out (my body isn’t so thankful). There was an all too short meditation section that MANY people seemed interested in, and I really think the organisers should give this a bit more focus next year just by the huge number of people that were interested in it.
Some great talks on nutrition (sugar, never again) and mental health by Bressie and others were some of the highlights for me. In fact, just like with meditation, I think even more could be done in these areas next year with maybe some interaction for people to make it more fun and to get people to open up a bit more. People rarely put themselves out there when it comes to expressing themselves and when attending an event like this with an open mind, this really could be capitalised on to bring the most out of people artistically and emotionally. The fact that Bressie talking about mental health was the most attended of the events (as far as I could see) really shows that people are very curious about mental health, and their curiosity could be rewarded more.
A special shout-​out to the range of amazing foods & drinks provided by some really awesome small businesses. This was suppose to be an event about fitness but the amount I ate would say otherwise.
All in all, this event is what I want to see more of. Fitness, mental health, nutrition & openness are some real things that Ireland could pioneer in for the future and it’s events like Wellfest that will lead the vanguard in these areas. Sign me up for round 2.

Well, well, well (fest).
Personally, I think that Ireland is overloaded on festivals, ‘paloozas, and ‘stockens’ etc. I mean, I like listening to music in a field as much as the next person but it’s bordering on system overload at the moment.
Wellfest, however, fills a notable gap in the festival market. It’s a healthy, foodie day festival offering a perfect sampler for individuals to try those sport-​y things that they can’t afford on a daily basis. There’s a smörgåsbord of classes ranging from pilates to yoga to crossfit. Healthy food and juice around every corner. Seriously delightful goods from the Happy Pear among others. I found myself strolling around in an endorphin-​induced haze. A nice change of pace from the rest of the festival scene!
Welcome to Dublin, well-​fest. We’ll see you next year.

I have to say I’ve been waiting for a festival like this to come up for some time. Dublin has really taken a turn towards the sporty, healthy, foodie & holistic in recent times in my opinion, and it was a smart move to harness some of the services on offer in one place.
Herbert Park is the perfect venue for a gathering of this type in Dublin — it’s such a gorgeous place — even on a dull day like Saturday’s, the leafy trees, lake and green lawns still transcend the greyness.
Wellfest itself was on point — excellently organised with friendly and efficient staff, from the security to the ticket booth workers. There was loads of space to wander round, and bean bags in the middle to chill and people watch. If you were so inclined, you could try anything from yoga to TRX, pilates, and some type of aerobics with a woman screaming at you, which apparently a lot of people dig (I’ll stick to the zen corner ta!)
There was a smattering of healthy eating stalls (Natasha’s Raw Food a highlight as always), and some really interesting discussions in the Talk Tent (unofficial name!)
I’m very much looking forward to what next year will bring.

I think it was a really good event yo discover new activities and brands. However I think it was a little too expensive compared to what was offered if you’re not interesting on doing many classes.

It was great to see so many people (somehow about 70% are girls???) who are interested in getting fit/​be healthy etc. And Thank God, it wasn’t raining!
I wanted to do Pilates but I was late getting there so I couldn’t join. Also I was too late to book the Pilates class. Pity!
Cooking class was a good idea but I didn’t particular like 2 guys doing it when they started to use F word. No need for it. You can be funny without using it, in my opinion.
Ticket price € 35 is expensive if you couldn’t book any classes, in my opinion. But thanks to Unilocal,I didn’t need to worry about and got Unilocal goodies bag too! Hoorey!
I’m not into sports at all (I like Pilates though). But there are many people like me want to try healthy food, healthy recipes and try out stretch classes, not hard exercise. Hope they put more tents like that next year.

I had a great day at Wellfest! I think there are some areas that the organisers could definitely look to improve next year, but given this was the first year of the event I was impressed.
There was a really wide selection of events happening. On the main stage a variety of mostly aerobic type classes were taking place all day, there was a large tent with Pilates/​yoga type classes happening all day too as well as some smaller areas where you could do spinning and TRX throughout the day. There were also zones where the pre-​booked workshops were held, a tent hosting talks and plenty stands selling healthy produce and fitness gear.
I tried to get as much into my day as I could and highlights included the Body Attack class on the main stage, ballet barre in the Wellbeing tent and my delicious BBQ lunch from Kinara Kitchen. I had also signed up in advance for the Viking Method workshop after reading about it in magazines. The exercises were obviously effective but I thought the level of the workshop was a bit too difficult — I wanted a challenge but some of the exercises were difficult to complete one rep of and a lot of people left midway through due to the difficulty. This was more the fault of the particular trainer than the festival though!
One other thing that would be good to improve would be the number of food options as queues were quite long at times but I imagine this will increase next year. The Welltalk tent definitely has potential to be expanded too — I really enjoyed the Happy Pear demo and the talk on Crossfit sounded interesting but one talk on nutrition myths was beyond basic (advising to avoid low fat products as they are generally high in sugar — something I think would already be common knowledge among anyone interested in healthy eating). I think they could potentially have more than one talk tent, as there’s only so much working out you can do in one day so it’d be good to have more restful options for in between classes.
All in all would highly recommend the event and based on the standard this year I’m sure the organisers will come back with something even better next year!

Pretty decent event! I attended WellFest with two friends yesterday and I must say… I’m so sore! We arrived around 10:30 and gave the park a quick walk around to assess the lay of the land.
There was a large variety of fitness offerings but I was a bit disappointed with the lack of food vendors. There was one tent with a few good options including Punnet Health but there was only one place for coffee and it had a queue for the entire event. Hopefully next year will show an increase in food options.
For classes we did Les Mills BodyAttack which is one of my faves and is offered at West Wood Club. After that we listened to the guys from Happy Pear for a bit before heading to Ballet Barre followed by intermediate Pilates. Not so into Barre but Pilates was pretty good.
After that we took a little break for some Kinara Kitchen and good coffee from Cocobrew. We had planned on resting for a while but there was the most animated dance instructor on stage so we found ourselves pulled into Reggaeton for 20 minutes before heading to the TRX FIT class. I highly recommend both — Reggaeton because the instructor was so good and TRX because it kicked my butt.
We ended our event with a little yoga and a snack from Natasha Raw Foods. Overall it was a pretty good day and I’m sure the next event will be even better!

I’m not sure if I’m being too hard giving 3 stars. I do think WellFest has a lot of potential, but there could be improvements.
The festival is really well organised, the layout and setup is excellent. The highlight for me was the WellTalk section. The covered area for the talks was large, but still felt somewhat intimate. The talks were very interesting, covering areas such as busting myths about nutrition and fueling for performance.
There are demonstrations by fitness companies and different health-​food companies showing their wares, so there were a few free food samples going around. There were great food stalls, however, not nearly enough. The choice could have been much greater and queues were long for a good bit of the day. The longest queue was for the coffee van, there was no way I was queuing 30min+ for a coffee (popped out to a café 2 minutes down the road).
There were classes that could be booked in advance, however, they were completely booked out by the time I checked online. Considering the relatively small number of people that could avail of these classes (compared with the number of people at the festival), I am guessing most people attending WellFest didn’t get to join any of these classes. I think these classes are where you would get most of the value of the € 35 entrance fee.
And this brings me to my main gripe with WellFest, the entrance fee. Personally, I think € 35 is a bit steep for entrance to a festival were most activities ultimately are publishing themselves and/​or trying to sell you stuff. Maybe, if I’d got a class or two in I would feel better about the price. WellFest has so much potential and I did enjoy the day. However, more food stalls and perhaps different ticketing options (i.e. entrance with/​without WellWorkshops).

I attended the WellFest with a friend yesterday and I have to say I had a really nice day.
I thought the location and space were great and everything seemed very well organised.
There was quite a wide selection of events and activities happening throughout the day, many companies doing demonstrations on their products and some really nice food stalls.
I enjoyed browsing through the different stalls (and the free samples/​goodies, we got few of them — including a 5day pass to Raw gym) and it was nice seeing a lot of local businesses advertising their products and food. I spent some time looking up online some of the products when I got back home (like the Rocktape or the Dr Coy’s healthy food — the chocolate was amazing).
In terms of food it was pretty good, however I felt there could have been more choice. There were not many stalls and they had long queues for most of the day. For example there was only one van selling coffee and there were huge queues for the whole day.
So much so, that myself and my friend found it was quicker going to a local coffee shop outside the WellFest area and then coming back rather than queuing at the van.
The things I personally enjoyed the most was the WellTalk section.
I attended Happy Pear brothers’ cookery demo (even though we only got the last 10 minutes but it was pretty fun), the fuelling for performance talk and the busting common myths of nutrition talk. I found all of them extremely interesting and fun to listen to and got few great tips on nutrition.
There were several classes/​workshops throughout the day — yoga, pilates, TRX, crossfit and many more — and people attending seemed to have a great time.
The one thing I would improve for next year would be maybe having some of the workshops open to a larger number of people as it’s unfortunate that not everybody could partake having paid full ticket price. I also would have liked to try some of them myself but unfortunately they were all booked up when I searched for them online.
Overall I enjoyed the WellFest and I am giving a 4 star review since it was the first year and it was something new, however there could be few minor tweaks to make it even better.

I was super excited to this event. I have been to some fitness days before and knew what to expect. I knew that Wellfest would start at about 9 am but I had walked for about 5 hours in the previous evening because of Dublin’s Culture night so I was tired and needed to sleep in a little, arriving there at about 11.30 am.
I could hear the loud music pumping and I could not wait really.
I passed the entrance with no hassle as my name was noted in the Unilocal list. Turning to the entrance’s corner I saw Emily and Kate in the « Unilocal desk» teaching many people how to upload the app and check in to get some freebies. I was a bit disappointed because there were no Unilocal special goodies bags anymore and I thought there would be a few saved for the Unilocal reporters (but it was my fault as I did not know they would be available for a certain number of people who checked in first) but there was none left so I grabbed a few things that were available and I was told I needed to upload a picture to get the stylized water bottle (which looked all red and pretty amazing). The internet sign was not so good in the park and it took me some time to be able to upload one so by the time I went back there was nothing left.
I decided to go around to see what was happening and went right away to the well being tent to try some stretches. I was impressed by the amount of people that were there and I can see the health industry is getting big in Dublin as probably many people were there really because
it seemed pretty hype and cool.
I thought that for the price people would get some sort of Wellfest bag with samples (because that is what sponsors do in such events) and that yoga mattresses would be provided not to keep but only to use in there when needed but I did not see any, only a few people that seemed a bit lost like me (doing planks in the grass, but this was not such an issue) wondering where was that info that we should have brought our own and then I saw it was being sold in there.
Some things were very well organized as the well kept toilets, a station with drinkable water and another one for cleaning up the hands with sanitizer. There were lots of food sellers and the main stage was the one that seemed the most energetic.
The set up was basically 2 well being tents (one for walk-​ins and the other one for very similar workshops that had to be booked online and had a huge waiting list so I preferred to go to the first tent instead; a spinning tent with lessons that also needed to be booked and were paid; a TRX exercise station with interesting looking machinery; a tent for talks and a cooking show and the biggest tent of the whole festival only had the purpose of selling healthy foods such as active almonds, raw coconut, protein bites, essential oils and so on. Also there were a few bean bags on the grass to relax (but only to the lucky few who managed to catch them!).
I decided to browse everywhere then I watched the Happy Pear chefs cooking veggie pad thai and banana bread, did a full on aerobics Viking method of squats/​jumping/​plank/​kicks for 45 mins, relaxed with yoga and meditation for beginners and had some protein balls (because the queues were insane in the stalls).
The main thing is that for the price of 35 euros I felt that most people were flogged lots of products that are part of diet fads and it seemed absurd to have to pay extra for a particular workshop. Also, the tent for talks did not have so many interesting topics even though the chefs were indeed funny and charming all the way.
Dublin has so much to offer and there are several classes of yoga/​pilates/​meditation done in parks for free of for a fiver and I did not see anything that was very impressive to be worthy the entrance. Also, being very used to exercises and gym I knew most of the techniques and there are many videos in Youtube which can be followed in your home to do the same thing.
For me it was an overall «meh» experience unfortunately even though I still loved to have the opportunity to check it out (thanks you guys!)

Great day out! Learned lots! Fantastic food and great fun! Highly recommended for next year.

Great festival, serious turnout and lots of options and things for people to do and try out fitness wise. Good encouraging atmosphere, not to mention the healthy tasty food. Really enjoyed the yoga, happy pear cooking and crossfit class. Fantastic finish from Niall Breslin about mental wellness. Already looking forward to what next year has to offer!

Wellfest… well…what to say?
This was the first year for the festival. In theory, this is right down my street… hanging with healthy people, eating healthy food, learning about healthy life choices and partaking in healthy activity.
Tickets for the festival were € 35 which is, in my opinion, a little pricey. Others didn’t seem to have an issue (Celtic tiger, is that you purring??) & there appeared to be a large turnout. Body beautifuls were everywhere, decked out in colourful Lycra and leggings, armed with yoga mats and water bottles.
We were lucky with the weather; it was overcast, with the odd spurt of sunshine, but it stayed dry and surprisingly warm. Perfect for some outdoor ramblings in Herbert Park.
The layout of the festival was good, and ensured you got a good sense of what was on offer. One round of the perimeter saw tents and stands offering food, workshops, fitness paraphernalia, chill out zones and, of course, various exercise classes.
The food on offer was mostly healthy choices. I chose a vegan seaweed wrap from Natasha’s Living Foods. I am not a vegan. I like my meat. But this was good. So good that I actually purchased another for my walk home when I was leaving. Spicy kimchi filling turned what could have been an ‘it-​tastes-​like-​cardboard-​but-​i-​paid-​€ 8-for-it-so-I’m-eating-it’ meal into a ‘I-​could-​maybe-​live-​off-​these-​forever’ meal.
There were plenty of free samples from the other vendors. glenisk yoghurt, raw cocoa nibs, green something juices.great. So my Wellfest was starting to turn into a Gluttonfest. But I won’t complain, it’s all good for me, right? :)
Being an avid coffee drinker, I went to get my morning wake-​up fuel. Unfortunately there seemed to be only one vendor selling coffee and the queue for this was long. Very long. All day.
Most of the workshops were booked out in advance of the day. Nevertheless, there were plenty of other things on offer. The WellTalk tent hosted talks from various health conscious individuals. The Happy Pear twins were doing a cookery demo when I first arrived and there was a large attendance. Mostly women of course.
I decided to partake in a TRX class to lessen my gluttonous guilt. This was my first experience with this class and I enjoyed it. The instructor was super motivating and I am definitely going to check out the classes in my local gym. Other classes on offer were spinning, meditating, yoga, Pilates. Unfortunately I didn’t bring my mat but the grass was dry for those as forgetful as me.
Well…Would I return and pay full ticket price? I’m not so sure. My attendance was a last minute decision. So Perhaps, if I’d booked onto some interesting workshops and the good weather could be guaranteed. A lot of the exercise classes are offered for free in my local gym. However, the novelty of doing them outside and in nature is a nice change.
Overall I enjoyed my afternoon in Herbert Park and came away feeling well fed, well in mind and well in body.

I had lots of fun this afternoon! The festival was just great =) Many activities happening at the same time, even hard to decide where to go
I took the chance to try stuff I never tried before, like TRX and the Viking method. Both are very interesting
Also lots of free stuff haha Unilocal goods bag, newspaper, yogurt, samples… Can’t wait for next festival!

What a great alternative to a typical festival! The day was filled with accomplishing healthy weekend goals and learning more about Dublin’s leading workout studios and class offerings!
We enjoyed the piloxing course, the spin class, intermediate Pilates, meditation and mindfulness, and the triggerpoint foam rolling classes! All were challenging, but extremely enjoyable.
The food options were relatively limited, but can see this changing for the next one! There were a lot of vendors there, trying to sell their products. Yoga mats, coconut oil, cocoa nibs, juices, etc. It’s a good chance to learn about local businesses and things that wouldn’t otherwise be immediately available to you.
I would suggest bringing: a big towel, a yoga mat, antibacterial hand gel, and a refillable water bottle!
I am exhausted, but that’s because this festival was so fun! And from all the working out!

Best fitness festival in Dublin!
Lots of workshops on fitness, great food and Free stuff — I got 5 day gym pass from Raw ;-)