The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Fitness Challenge

Sometimes, it can be difficult to find the motivation for getting in a workout. Many personal trainers encounter this challenge with their clients, and you yourself can likely attest to the difficulty in getting your clients off the couch and moving—sometimes even to come to your sessions that they're paying you for!

People have different factors that contribute to their levels of motivation and drive. But interestingly enough, once the motivation is truly there, other problems and hindrances tend to somewhat disappear. Tapping into this can mean the difference between them making the positive changes they need to make, and simply falling by the wayside.

But, as a trainer, how do you tap into it? How do you get clients invested in their own success, and then keep them there?

Well, one amazing way to do this is to run a great fitness challenge.

Know What Your Goals Are

This is important both for your clients and yourself. For instance, your personal goals might be to get a higher level of buy-in and engagement from your clients. Or, you might want to foster greater results from already engaged clients. And their goals are to improve in their fitness, in some way.

The truth is that, wherever your people are in their personal levels of fitness, they can always push themselves to newer heights. And who doesn't love the community aspect of a challenge?

Challenges enable us to really surround one another with positive energy, more so than just a workout plan with some gym equipment. So, know what you're trying to achieve before you start with the practical aspects of the challenge.

Is it about weight loss or better body composition? Strength training? Keeping consistency? Creating a community among your clients? When you're looking for your ideas for your own workout challenge, keep your participants at the forefront of your planning. Don't just arbitrarily pick something, make it really connect to their needs.

How Long Should It Last?

Remember that when it comes to fitness, health, and wellness, you need to make your challenges longer than just a few days—in most circumstances. The reason for this is that it will take a few weeks at least to see results, for the most part.

The exception to this is if you're doing a fitness challenge that's based on participation. That's right—not all challenges have to be specific to benchmarks like body fat percentage or number of steps taken.

Sometimes, it can be helpful to run a fitness challenge group through a challenge based on getting to the gym or getting their workouts done. This is especially useful for newer clients who are trying to find their feet in a workout routine.

For instance, what if you connected all your new clients into a group chat, and told them to take a picture of their workout and text it to the group when they knock it out.

Then, whoever has met their goal of three workouts per week wins a prize. This is just one example, only to show you that the only limitations within a challenge are the ones in your mind.

Most challenges will be longer, like 30-day challenges, or 4-week challenges. Keep the following in mind:

Shorter Challenges

These will be less about results, and more about participants being engaged. It comes from the mindset that in order to start working out, you need to have your workout clothes on. So, creating the habit to just get to the workout is a great way to get the spark started in motivation.

These could go from a week to a month, but that leads us to longer ones.

Longer Challenges

With these, it's more about results—because you can! It is entirely possible to see marked improvements over weeks and months. So, if you have a group of established clients who are all looking to cut body fat, then you can do a "transformation challenge." This will track progress in body composition and lean muscle mass over the course of, say, 60 or 90 days.

Just remember that the difficulty with longer challenges is keeping people bought in over time. As days turn to weeks and months, it can become somewhat difficult to keep people's attention. Typically, the most successful challenges will be 30 days, or possibly eight weeks for longer ones.

When you go beyond this, it also requires more effort on your part to keep them involved.

The Real Point

This is what you really need to hear — challenges are about mixing things up and giving participants a reason to pour fuel on the fire of their wellness program.

This is another reason why it's so important to find the right length of time for the challenge. If people get bored with your updates, the likelihood that they will complete the challenge diminishes significantly.

So, make sure that, whatever timeframe that you're focused on, you consider how you're going to keep your participants motivated in their fitness program.

Keeping Their Interest

There are many reasons why people engage in physical activity. Sometimes, it's to look and feel better. Others, it's about athletic competition. And, still, for others, it's about long-term health and wellness. Whatever the reason, it's usually best to group participants by common goals and maintaining the right timeframe for each group.

Then, consider how you engage with them. For instance, a group chat can be a great way to keep your clients engaged and active in the challenge.

Furthermore, social media has some great tools to help as well. For instance, you could start a private Facebook group specifically for facilitating your challenge.

To this end, there are also many fitness apps that can help you facilitate competition in a way that promotes engagement. Don't forget to use every opportunity you can to make your challenges fun, easy to participate in, and beneficial to participant goals.

This includes using devices like smartwatches and heart rate monitors. If they help your people track progress in a meaningful way, find a method of incorporating them into your workout program or challenge.

Exceptions to the Rule

Rules are meant to be broken. So, what if you want to do a more immediate challenge? Like, something to pull everyone together on a Saturday or online on a given day? What would this look like?

You would only want to consider this for the people who have the ability to perform, but you could do something like a one-day push-up challenge. This could be useful in person, or as an online fitness challenge, where your clients film themselves doing push-ups throughout the day, then report them in the group. Whoever does the most in 24 hours wins!

Don't back yourself into a corner, just be careful in how you do such challenges. For example, in the one-day push-up challenge, you wouldn't want to include clients who might injure themselves by doing too many repetitions throughout the day, especially if they have a lot of extra weight to lose.

Make sure you know your clients and what they're capable of doing. And always make sure they check with a physician before taking part to ensure they're healthy enough for more intense challenges on top of their regular exercise.

Get Creative and Make It Fun!

One of the easiest and least expensive pieces of fitness equipment to get is a resistance band. How could you do a fitness challenge with something like this simple equipment?

Remember that most fitness challenges deal with big things. Better body composition, heavier lifts, more repetitions, crazy HIIT workouts, nutrition, cardio workouts, and more. But what about the small things?

Sometimes, you can help your clients cover the more overlooked, less popular areas—like balance and stretch exercises. Many of us know these people, and many of us are guilty of this. We focus so much on our specific gains in various departments that we forget the "smaller" exercises.

If you find a group of your clients who regularly do this, a fitness challenge can be an effective way to motivate your clients to get in this important and often overlooked aspect of fitness. It's all about how you incentivize them.

Ultimately, if you follow these principles, you will find a greater sense of engagement from your clients. Better engagement means that they are more likely to see results, and thus, remain your clients into the future.

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