Agendas

Join us alongside our esteemed VIP guests, industry leaders and key stakeholders as we celebrate our 10th anniversary as the Middle East’s leading international health, fitness and wellness tradeshow.

Hear from VIP guests of honour representing government stakeholders, Italian Exhibition Group and industry leaders, as we reflect on a decade of growth and impact across the region, before unveiling our new identity and future vision for the show.

This ceremony will also celebrate the launch of the 2026 UAE Health and Fitness Industry Report, with Qantara Sports.

Join Love Recruitment for a special live edition of the Love Your Career Podcast, bringing together industry leaders for an open conversation on careers, leadership and opportunity across the fitness industry. Hear real experiences, practical advice and insights designed to help you take the next step in your career.

Explore the key recruitment challenges facing the fitness industry today, from attracting the right talent to retaining high-performing teams.

This session brings together pioneering leaders, elite athletes, and visionaries shaping the future of the wellness industry. This inspiring female panel explores how women are overcoming barriers, building resilient businesses, and driving meaningful representation across the fitness and sports landscape. Attendees will gain actionable insights on leadership, resilience, and navigating an ever-evolving global industry. Join us to celebrate the trailblazers transforming the sector and empowering the next generation of female leaders.

This session delivers an empirical, data-driven deep dive into the state of the UAE’s health and fitness ecosystem. Grounded in recent market surveys and workforce analytics, the session bridges the gap between what consumer populations demand from their wellness providers and what industry employees (trainers, coaches, facility staff, and management) need to stay engaged and reduce turnover.

Rub shoulders with industry friends, senior leaders and key stakeholders over lunch in exclusive social setting. Catch up with familiar faces, make new connections and enjoy quality time with VIP Guests.

Most members who leave decide in their first ninety days, and they decide on the floor, with their coach. This twenty-minute session breaks retention down from the coach's side of the room: the three windows that decide whether a member stays for years, and the repeatable moves that win each one. You'll walk away knowing exactly what to do in a member's first session, first month, and first ninety days, drawn from the operating model behind a gym that holds 89 to 92% retention against a 60% industry average.

The fitness industry trains excellent fitness professionals and underprepares them for conversation. Most personal trainers can design a programme but far fewer know how to ask the question that finds out why a client keeps cancelling, or how to reframe a goal so that a client actually believes they can achieve it. Led by Sakina Khan, Founder of Health Fitness Academy, this 60-minute session combines a practical workshop on the coaching and communication skills that keep clients coming back with a panel discussion from three professionals who have built careers on connection, not just certification.

The session draws on Sakina’s original MSc research into the underrepresentation of women from diverse communities in fitness. Her work explores whether role models increase participation and opens up a more nuanced question than the industry often assumes: what truly helps people feel seen, supported, and ready to take part?

Whether you are a newly qualified PT, a gym manager building a team, or a leader with an interest in how the industry can better serve underrepresented communities, this session will leave you with something you can use immediately. Not a theory to file away. A better question to ask your very next client.

Modern corporate executives, business leaders, and high-pressure professionals operate in environments demanding relentless performance, rapid decision-making, and long hours—akin to elite professional athletes. However, traditional fitness coaching often falls short when applied to corporate clients facing systemic workplace stress, chronic fatigue, and erratic schedules.

"The Corporate Athlete Blueprint" is a dynamic, highly interactive workshop designed specifically for personal trainers, strength coaches, wellness practitioners, and fitness professionals. The session bridges the gap between traditional fitness training and total executive health, equipping coaches with actionable frameworks to optimize energy, manage stress, and build sustainable resilience in high-pressure corporate clients.

In an increasingly saturated digital landscape, creating high-performing fitness and lifestyle content is no longer enough to sustain a profitable coaching business. This masterclass breaks down the exact operational and strategic blueprint Rob Lipsett used to transition from a top-tier content creator to the founder of a scalable, high-retention coaching enterprise. Attendees will learn how to turn social media attention into predictable client acquisition, build systems that deliver real results at scale, and escape the burnout of trading hours for dollars.

Celebrate our 10th edition at our exclusive Official Networking Party, presented by YOUR Personal Training. Join fellow exhibitors, speakers, buyers and key stakeholders for an evening of drinks, entertainment and great company as we celebrate a decade of the industry coming together. This is an invite-only or Executive Pass event.

Go beyond calorie counting and macros to explore the practical nutrition knowledge every PT needs to better support their clients’ health, performance and long-term results.

As the UAE continues to establish itself as a global destination for sport, tourism, hospitality, wellness and entertainment, the industries that once operated independently are becoming increasingly interconnected. Success now depends not only on world-class venues and events, but on developing the talent, leadership and partnerships that power the entire experience economy.

At Dubai Active, Les Roches will convene an exclusive executive roundtable bringing together senior leaders from hospitality, sport, fitness, entertainment, education and destination development to explore how these sectors can work together to build the workforce of the future.

Hosted by Matthew Williams, the discussion will move beyond individual industries to examine the broader ecosystem—how hotels are evolving into wellness destinations, how sport is driving tourism and economic growth, how fitness brands are expanding into hospitality and community engagement, and how education must adapt to prepare graduates with the skills needed for an increasingly integrated industry.

The wellbeing market is exploding, but fitness professionals risk being left behind. Oli reveals how to expand your service offering beyond traditional training to include sleep optimisation, breathwork, and lifestyle coaching—creating multiple revenue streams whilst positioning yourself as a holistic wellbeing expert

As a world-renowned ultra-endurance athlete, extreme explorer, and Ironman triathlete, Dani stands out for conquering some of the planet's most formidable environments; including running marathons across the North Pole and Mount Everest, taking on the 250 km Amazon Jungle Ultra, and completing seven marathons on seven continents in ten days.

In this session, Dani will draw from his unique experiences pushing mental and physical limits in extreme conditions, to highlight how cutting-edge technology, biohacking, and recovery science can be leveraged to optimize human performance and resilience. By bridging elite self-mastery with scalable health innovations, his presentation sets the stage for the Future Wellness Summit’s deeper discussions on health, mindfulness, nutrition, fitness, and wellbeing.

Why employers, developers, and hospitality groups have become the real frontline of preventive health and what separates a wellness program that survives the budget from one that gets quietly cut. 

Rub shoulders with industry friends, senior leaders and key stakeholders over lunch in exclusive social setting. Catch up with familiar faces, make new connections and enjoy quality time with VIP Guests.

This session explores the evolution of inclusive fitness architecture, unpacking how digital ecosystems, biomechanics, and fitness/ rehabilitation spaces can be engineered to accommodate the full continuum of human capability—from long-term physical disabilities to temporary impairments caused by acute sports injuries.

By bridging clinical rehabilitation with elite coaching and adaptive data analytics, the panel will map out how the fitness industry can transition toward dynamic, accessible programming that supports both lifelong physical adaptation and specialized post-injury recovery pipelines. 

As stress, burnout, and mental fatigue continue to impact modern lifestyles across the region, this session explores how recovery, nervous system regulation, and intentional wellness practices are becoming essential tools for sustainable high performance.

The discussion will examine how to better support long-term wellbeing, resilience, and balance in increasingly demanding environments.

From workplace design and digital overload to stress, sedentary lifestyles, and lack of recovery, the environments we spend time in are having a growing impact on both physical and mental performance.

This session explores how workplaces, fitness spaces, and everyday environments across the GCC can better support focus, movement, wellbeing, and long-term human performance in an increasingly demanding world.

As conversations around longevity, recovery, and preventative health continue to grow across the GCC, peptides are rapidly emerging as one of the most talked-about developments in modern performance optimisation. This session explores the science behind peptides, innovations in delivery systems and supporting technologies, their role in recovery and metabolic health, and how evolving technological advancements are reshaping the future of health and fitness in the region.

The wellbeing market is exploding, but fitness professionals risk being left behind. Oli reveals how to expand your service offering beyond traditional training to include sleep optimisation, breathwork, and lifestyle coaching - creating multiple revenue streams whilst positioning yourself as a holistic wellbeing expert.

As conversations around longevity and preventative health continue to grow, the Middle East is also facing rising challenges linked to metabolic health, lifestyle-related illness, and chronic stress.

This session explores the changing role of wellness, medicine, nutrition, and movement in addressing one of the region’s most urgent health conversations, and why education, prevention, and community-led wellbeing have never been more important.

As wellness consumers increasingly seek connection, purpose and transformative experiences, retreats are evolving far beyond traditional travel offerings.

This session will explore how fitness, wellness and hospitality brands are building engaged communities through retreats that combine movement, recovery, education and lifestyle experiences.

Industry leaders will discuss the growing business opportunity behind wellness tourism, what today’s consumers expect from retreats, and how brands can create experiences that drive both impact and long-term loyalty.

A forward-looking keynote exploring how AI is accelerating the convergence of government strategy and the private fitness and wellness sector. Discover how greater collaboration, powered by technology and data, can unlock new approaches to public health, physical activity and preventative wellness at scale.

As the Middle East emerges as a global powerhouse for health innovation, the convergence of preventive medicine, digital fitness ecosystems, and deep tech is fundamentally redefining regional lifestyle standards. This session explores how the GCC is shifting away from reactive healthcare and standard fitness tracking toward predictive, lifelong human optimization. Bringing together pioneers in localized digital fitness, advanced neurocognitive performance, and next-generation venture building, the panel will dissect how AI-driven personalization, clinical longevity protocols, and cross-industry tech integration are scaling to meet the demands of a highly sophisticated, health-conscious population.

As consumer demands shift toward hyper-personalized, data-driven, and highly flexible wellness experiences, fitness operators and health destinations must modernize or risk obsolescence. This panel explores how regional and global industry leaders are leveraging cutting-edge technology, such as AI-driven management software, predictive analytics, smart venue integration, and automated operations, to build highly efficient, scalable models.

The discussion will focus on tech-enabled operational transformation across both gym operations and sports infrastructure. It addresses how leaders can cut overhead costs, streamline member retention, scale hybrid offerings, improve marketing impact and utilize automation to build leaner and scale faster from individual clubs to national-level sports ecosystems.

Rub shoulders with industry friends, senior leaders and key stakeholders over lunch in exclusive social setting. Catch up with familiar faces, make new connections and enjoy quality time with VIP Guests.

As businesses across the GCC and MENA region navigate economic uncertainty, shifting consumer behaviours, and growing demand for authenticity, this roundtable explores how trust, community, and long-term relationships are becoming essential drivers of sustainable growth.

Industry leaders will discuss evolving customer expectations, the role of purpose-led brands, and how businesses can build resilience through stronger communities, meaningful engagement, and responsible use of data and technology.

The session will also examine how empowering employees, prioritising wellbeing, and focusing on long-term customer value can help create more adaptable and future-ready business models.