The German fitness association VDF renewed its membership agreement with EHFA in July 2008. National association members were the association's founding constituency: they held votes at the general assembly, sat on the board, and were the route by which a European qualifications framework reached instructors in each country.
The announcement was dated 9 July 2008, and it came in a year when the association was assembling its national membership: the Dutch association Fit!vak became a member in September 2008, and the first meeting of national associations was held in Brussels on 2 October 2008.
Germany mattered disproportionately to that work. It was the largest single fitness market in Europe, with its own well developed training and certification structures and a strong tradition of vocational education. A European framework that Germany did not recognise would have been a framework for everywhere except the biggest market.
Membership also ran the other way. National associations brought the problems they were already trying to solve - how to compare qualifications across borders, how to give an instructor's certificate meaning to an employer in another country - into a forum where they could be solved once rather than country by country. See national associations and membership.
A European framework also needed national bodies for a practical reason. Qualifications are issued and regulated nationally, and the association had no power to change that: its standards could describe the competences an exercise professional should have, but whether a certificate carried weight in a country depended on what that country's education system did with it.