SWIFS festivals are built on three pillars of wellbeing:
Physical Activity, Mental Health, and Sustainable Living.
Physical Activity
Injury prevention exercises are there to help your body adapt to changes quickly and efficiently. With emphasis being put on strength and conditioning, they can help you maintain a healthy body and a kinder relationship to yourself over the years!
Orienteering instigates a balance between the physical body and the mind as you need to be able to interpret the terrain around you and execute your route choice successfully. While connecting to the nature, you also exercise self-confidence, decision-making and pressure management.
Beyond the views, fresh air, and the sounds and smells of nature, hiking also lowers the risk of heart disease, it improves your blood pressure and blood sugar levels, it boosts your bone density as it is a weight-bearing activity and it helps boost your mood as research shows that hiking has a positive impact on combating the symptoms of stress and anxiety!
Mental Wellbeing
Already before the pandemic, mental wellbeing started to take a prominent space in conversations about workplaces, schools, and communities. The pandemic made the situation worse, and SWIFS strives to bring simple yet effective ways of monitoring and improving your wellbeing to every participant through the following activities:
Meditation reduces stress, controls anxiety, promotes emotional health, enhances self-awareness, lengthens the attention span and overall helps your emotional, mental and spiritual wellbeing.
People not sleeping well due to stress and information overload is no longer news. Sleep is directly linked with productivity, weight balance, hormonal health, the strength of our immune system, the efficiency of our learning skills, empathy and athletic performance. Allow our scientists to shed light on this overwhelming issue.
Pilates creates flexible, strong muscles, improves posture, and develops core strength. Joseph Pilates, the creator of the pilates exercise concept, was adamant that pilates was about “the complete coordination of body, mind, and spirit”.
Breathing exercises and techniques help release toxins from your body, increase your energy and boost your immune system. An excellent and simple way to strengthen your lungs, improve sleep, help digestion, and help with the release of trauma and fear.
Sustainable Living
We can all strive towards the symbiosis of the way we live our lives and the wellbeing of the planet we inhabit. SWIFS sustainable living activities focus on the seemingly little, everyday practices that we can incorporate into our lives to make life better for both us and the Earth.
Landscaping with edible plants provides fresh produce without a trip to the store and with all the increased nutrients of home grown food. In addition, it helps you reduce your carbon foot-print and cut down on your gas and grocery bills, while giving you a creative outlet.
Sustainable gardening is one of the more respectable ways of helping our planet. It improves the freshness of the soil, and we learn to grow native, climate appropriate plants and engage in a rarely found gratifying feeling of watching our seeds grow and sprout season after season!
What we eat is not just a matter of how healthy we will be. Scientists are increasingly discovering ways in which nutrition based on sustainable food sources can help the planet with some of its biggest challenges: climate change, pollution, and disease.