Conference Sessions
Perspectives in Exercise Health and Fitness 2026 is an opportunity not to be missed. Join us for 2 days of extraordinary learning at a unique event relevant to all practitioners in exercise and physical activity. Perspectives in Exercise Health and Fitness 2026 is not your everyday conference. This year’s event is dedicated to fostering connection, reflection and learning about our clients, and ourselves. We are also offering a post-conference bonus webinar to put your conference learning into practice.
DAY 1 October 3: Women’s health symposium: Fuel, Hormones, Brain and Bones
DAY 2 October 4: Leadership Fitness: A Three-Part workout for your mind.
Conference details below!
(Sessions and times are subject to change.) All session times are MST.
Saturday October 3
Women’s Health Symposium: Fuel, Hormones, Brain and Bone
A lifestyle approach to active women’s health.
Get the latest applied evidence in women’s health and exercise physiology from Canada’s most innovative and leading researchers. Fireside chats are included after the morning sessions and afternoon sessions. These are unique opportunities for you to spend additional time with our presenters, ask questions and share ideas.
topics include:
Brain health and menopause
Nutrition and the female client
Exercise programming: applying the latest data to programming for women
Fuel, hormones and bone
Bone Health
Saturday October 3: Sessions
8:30am start
Welcome: 8:30 am Tish Doyle Baker
MOrning Sessions lead by:
Nicole Culos-Reed PHD, Cindy Barha pHd and Tish Doyle Baker PHD
Morning FIRESIDE CHAT AND DISCUSSION
Bring your questions and thoughts to discuss with the morning’s presenters.
LUNCH 12:30-1:30 pm
Afternoon Sessions Lead by:
Kelly Shaw phd and Tish Doyle Baker pHd
Closing session:
building Momentum in women’s exercise health
Afternoon Fire Chat and Discussion
Bring your questions and thoughts to discuss with the morning’s presenters.
Sunday October 4
8:30 am start
Leadership Fitness: The Three Part Workout For your Mind
The fitness industry is in the business of helping people grow stronger, healthier and more resilient. Yet the people and organizations that operate fitness businesses and who are on the front lines delivering services face their own challenges: Rapid change, shifting customer expectations, talent shortages, economic pressures, technology disruption and increasing demands.
Sunday’s sessions explore three complementary perspectives to help you build greater capacity in yourself, your community and organization. Together they offer a practical framework for strengthening leadership effectiveness, improving decision-making and navigating the complexity of our industry with greater confidence.
SESSIons Lead by:
Laurie Hillis
Session 1: 8:30-10:30 am
Mindtraps: Rethinking how we think
Certainty is the Enemy: Rethinking how We Think
Based on the research of Jennifer Garvey Berger
Most leadership challenges are not solved by working harder; they are solved by thinking differently. Jennifer Garvey Berger's concept of “mindtraps” highlights the hidden assumptions and mental shortcuts that can limit our effectiveness.
Common mindtraps include believing we have the complete story, assuming others see situations as we do, or seeking certainty when situations are inherently complex. In the fitness business, this shows up everywhere: a leadership team assuming they understand why membership is declining without asking front-line staff what they’re actually hearing from clients, or a head office assuming a new program or policy lands with regional coordinators the way it was intended at the top. With researchers, practitioners and business operators often sitting in the same room with very different vantage points, the temptation to assume a shared understanding is especially high.
Session 2: 10:45-12:45 pm
Positive intelligence
Meet your Saboteurs: The mental fitness workout every leader needs
Based on the research of Shirzad Chamine
Once leaders recognize the limitations of their thinking, the next challenge is learning how to respond differently. Positive Intelligence introduces the concept of mental fitness: the ability to manage internal saboteurs and strengthen the wiser, more constructive parts of ourselves, our Sage presence.
Under pressure, leaders may experience saboteurs such as the Controller, Pleaser, HyperAchiever, Avoider or Hyper-Vigilant. These patterns often emerge with good intentions but can create unintended consequences for teams and organizations. Positive Intelligence helps leaders notice these reactions and access their “Sage” mindset, characterized by curiosity, empathy, creativity and calm action. These saboteurs map closely onto patterns common in fitness leadership: the Hyper-Achiever and Controller in founders who built a business on personal drive and have trouble delegating as it scales, the Pleaser in client-facing roles where saying yes to everyone is the default, the Avoider when difficult staffing or performance conversations get postponed. Naming these patterns gives directors and coordinators, who may come from very different professional backgrounds, a shared, practical language for working with them. Key shift: moving from reactivity to intentional response.
LUNCH 12:45-1:45 pm
Session 3: 1:45-3:45
Positive intelligence Adult development and fallback
Falling Back, Bouncing Forward: The science of leadership growth
Based on the research of Jennifer Garvey Berger and Valerie Livesay
Adult Development explores how leaders make meaning of the world and how their capacity evolves over time. As leaders grow, they become better able to hold multiple perspectives, navigate ambiguity and manage competing priorities without becoming overwhelmed by them. However, growth is not always linear. Berger and Livesay describe the concept of “fallback,” where individuals temporarily revert to earlier ways of thinking when faced with stress, uncertainty or significant challenge.
Fallback is normal and universal. The goal is not to eliminate it but to recognize it and recover more effectively. This is highly visible in fitness organizations that have grown quickly: a founder who built one excellent studio, and then under the pressure of opening a second or third location or absorbing a tough financial quarter, falls back into single-site, do-it-all-myself habits that no longer serve a multi-location operation. It is also relevant to a sector currently in generational transition, where newer leaders are being asked to hold the kind of complexity that earlier generations grew into over many years, often without the same mentorship or grounding to draw on under pressure.
Webinar
October 20
10:00 AM - 12:00 pm (MST)
The Follow-Through: Making Leadership Fitness Stick
Leadership fitness, like physical fitness, isn't built in a single workout. It's built in the follow-through: what you do with what you've learned once you're back in the “gym” of daily work, under real pressure, with real people watching.
This session brings the group back together to share what actually happened. What mindtraps did you catch yourself in? Which saboteur showed up when things got busy? Where did you notice fallback, and how did you recover? Participants will share their learnings, the actions they took (or didn't), and the questions that surfaced once theory met their actual team, budget or busy season.
This isn't a re-teach. It's a spot check: a chance to troubleshoot together, normalize the messy parts of practice, and leave with sharper, more specific commitments than the ones made in the room the first time around.
This webinar, like our fireside chats, will get us thinking and reflecting on our personal leadership fitness and commitments through ongoing awareness, reflection and growth. Organizations that invest in these capacities are better positioned to navigate complexity, support their people and thrive in a rapidly changing industry.
If purchased with the original in person or virtual conference purchase: $15
If purchased separately October 4 to October 19: $35
Bonus webinar can only be purchased if a conference registration (in person or virtual) has been purchased at the same time or prior to.