By taking a less is more approach to her fitness vision, Tori Scott’s SweatCon Rally has gone from a single-city niche event to an expanding women’s global fitness revolution.
SweatCon Rally is a one-day, all-day workout event, comprised of like-minded fitness enthusiasts — mostly women — participating in what’s best described as a pub-crawl for fitness. Instead of pouring down pitchers of Budweisers, though, participants will instead be lacing up boxing gloves or cycling shoes and banging out three workouts conducted throughout a variety of the hottest, hippest boutique fitness clubs in the city.
More than 250 particiants are expected to work out at Saturday’s SweatCon Rally. From there, another SweatCon Rally (sweatconrally.com) will be in Boston on Oct. 27 then heads to the West Coast when it invades San Diego on Nov. 3. Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, and possibly Austin are on the docket for 2019 as well as London, which would officially make SweatCon a global event. It’s an overwhelming success story considering Scott’s inaugural three-day Boston rally in 2016 attracted just 32 people.
“The original feedback was positive, but the overwhelming opinion was that the time commitment was too long,” Scott said. “I knew, though, that this was an experience people were excited about and if I could replicate this model and bring it to other major cities, I would be able to help a lot more people on their fitness journey,” Tori says.
Scott was a three-sport athlete in college, but filling the sports void surprisingly became problematic after graduation. Not that Scott stopped working out, it was just a matter of how she was going to work out. Scott tried a few 5Ks, tackled half marathons, even finished a triathlon, but it was through trial and error through the city’s ever-growing fitness studios that she found her groove with CrossFit. She then added some SoulCycle — and found the inspiration to launch Sweat Concierge, a site dedicated to reviewing the newest and trendiest New York’s boutique classes.
“The core of Sweat Concierge has been to provide readers with honest and straightforward reviews of studios, classes and instructors from a source they can trust,” Scott says. “Our readers like to bounce around and are always looking for ways to keep their workout routine fun and interesting.”
What should you expect at Saturday’s SweatCon Rally?
From pedaling at pulse-pounding RPMs at Swerve to throwing (and possibly ducking) left hooks at Everybody Fights to cooling down in a child’s pose at Yoga Vida, Saturday’s SweatCon Rally has a variety of fitness classes — at condensed 30-minute versions. “We made sure to group studios together of varying intensities so that it’s completely doable and fun,” Scott says. And while most participants will be women, Scott says, men are more than welcome to attend. “There will be male participants,” Scott assures. “But it does skew toward women — about 85 percent.”
Saturday’s rally begins with an intro party at New York’s most talked about fitness club — NEO U. From there, groups will break off into one of five regional workout destination crawls.
NEO U (Bootcamp, Boxing, Yoga, Jenny Notorious FIT)
Flatiron (Fhitting Room, SWERVE, FlyFIT)
Astor Place (FlyWheel, Mile High Run Club, Yoga Vida)
Midtown (EverybodyFights, Solace New York, Y7 Studio)
Bryant Park (CorePower Yoga, BRICK, SWERVE).
The SweatCon layout resembles a pub crawl, and Scott hopes to capitalize on the millennial trend that’s veering away from booze-filled weekend bar binges and gravitating more toward fitness-centric activities.
And According to statistics from five years ago, fitness clubs have been popping up at a rate of 450 percent, making boutique fitness the fastest-growing element of health clubs. Another study, by the International Health, Racquet and Sports Club Association (IHRSA), more than 150 million fitness enthusiasts visited roughly 187,000 health clubs in the United States.
“Fitness and living a healthy lifestyle have become a badge of honor,” Scott says. “Instead of going out to bars, client dinners or brunch, people are working out with others. People want to be healthy and want to connect with others in the process. And group fitness—in-studio or through digital streaming—has given people that opportunity.”
And participants won’t be sweating without purpose. For each ticket to Saturday’s SweatCon sold (you can purchase tickets here), Reebok (the event’s sponsor), will match the ticket price and donate all proceeds to two female body-empowerment groups: Jenny Gaither’s Movement Foundation and the Women’s Strength Coalition. Participants will also get the opportunity to win a workout with actress Nina Dobrev and get a sneak peek at her latest collaboration with fitness guru Les Mills.
“Fun is to be expected — and maybe a little sweat in the process,” Scott says.
