A new study shows that a full day at a festival demands more from your body than many people think. By analyzing data from wearable smart accessories, researchers discovered that attendees move almost as much as the average marathon runner during a ten to twelve-hour festival day.
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Data from devices including the Apple Watch and Fitbit shows that attendees take between 40,000 and 50,000 steps during a ten to twelve-hour event. By comparison, a runner takes an average of 50,000 to 60,000 steps during a marathon. A day of heavy kickrolling, klaplonging, and dancing can therefore come surprisingly close to the activity level of a marathon.
Partying as a full-body workout
However, the total number of steps is not solely due to dancing. At a festival, visitors spend hours walking between various stages, lockers, food stalls, and navigating through the crowd. Combined, all these factors ensure that partygoers are on their feet almost all day. As a result, an event quickly becomes a full-body fitness workout. At the same time, the energetic, social atmosphere of especially harder music styles ensures that people remain constantly in motion without realizing how much energy they are expending.
The dance floor as a gym
Although the intensity differs from running, research shows that a festival day can be physically much more demanding than many people think. In some cases, longer periods on the dance floor can even rival traditional forms of exercise.
So the next time someone tells you that klaplonging all day isn’t cardio, there are numbers to prove otherwise. That leaves the question: do you go for 42 kilometers of asphalt, or ten hours on the dance floor?
