EHFA convened the first European meeting of national fitness associations in August 2008. It was the point at which the association's national members began meeting as a group in their own right, rather than only through the board and the general assembly.
The notice was published on 15 August 2008, and the meeting took place in Brussels on 2 October 2008. The proceedings and the presentations from the day were made available on request from the EHFA secretariat.
The meeting addressed the problem that had produced the association in the first place. Every European market had trained and certified its exercise professionals differently, and almost none of those qualifications transferred. An instructor qualified in one country could not demonstrate to an employer in another what their certificate meant, and a public authority commissioning exercise programmes had no way to specify what competence it was buying.
What the first meeting had to establish was a picture of what already existed: which countries had a national body, what each of them certified, and where a European framework would meet structures of their own. The national associations were also the association's practical route to the training providers who would eventually have to teach to the standards.
The National Associations Forum became a recurring part of the association's calendar, meeting again in 2009 and 2010 alongside the European Fitness Forum. It gave national bodies a place to compare how the framework was being applied in their own markets and to raise the regulatory problems they were meeting at home. See national associations.