The secrets to running a successful challenge
Everyone loves a gym challenge. The sense of satisfaction you feel when you reach the end and the comradery you feel with your fellow challenge mates is hard to top.
Beyond personal enjoyment, challenges are one of the most powerful ways to gain new clients and draw more people into your health or fitness facility. Some of the most successful businesses are continuously running challenges throughout the year and using their client’s successes to promote their brand. These gyms or health facilities report greater ‘word of mouth’ business – just from running these challenges, over any other form of advertising.
While it might be tempting to jump straight into a challenge, pulling one off successfully in a way that benefits your business requires a few basic steps.
A sense of community
The most important aspect of running a body transformation challenge is that you get the right balance between competition and personal development. You want participants to have the motivation to push themselves to get great results in an environment that has elements of competition while remaining inclusive.
The best way to foster a community spirit is by keeping your participants at the forefront of your planning. Don't just arbitrarily pick something, make it really connect to their needs, whether that be strength training, body composition or consistency.
Setting up challenge groups on social media is also a great way to keep the community tight-knit and give them the chance to talk to each other about small wins and roadblocks along the way.
Measuring individual performance
Being able to see how much total Body Fat is lost and Muscle Mass is gained is an excellent way of measuring success across a challenge. Assessing the differentiation in visceral fat and subcutaneous fat mass lost over the challenge is a unique measure of progress that not many can use. These metrics are also a great way to advertise your next challenge!
Reward your clients with their own personalised report, highlighting their achievements over the challenge period giving them a record of their success. Conversely if the client hasn’t obtained their desired results, here is a unique opportunity to engage with your client to find out how you can help further to make sure they do reach their goals.
Keeping it interesting
It is easy to set up your challenges to focus on the big things like better body composition, heavier lifts or intense cardio workouts. But remember not everyone in your gym has the time and dedication to use a challenge to springboard into a complete transformation.
Creating challenges based on smaller, more overlooked areas like at-home step challenges, increased water consumption and more sleep time, show your members that the benefits of a challenge are all encompassing and in turn attract a diverse range of members to participate.
Get tech savvy
Getting started can be a bit of a battle if you’ve never run a challenge before, but keeping track of individual results is essential to keeping your clients motivated. Most gym owners don’t have the time to be doing weigh-ins, taking measurements and tracking the progress on a spreadsheet, so using fitness apps or body scanners onsite like Evolt 360 is an easy way to collate the data without spending hours putting it together on excel spreadsheets.
Challenges are intense so presenting results in a leader board showing metrics such as the most amount of Fat Lost or the most amount of Muscle Gained at any time during or after the challenge is an excellent way to show constant improvement and see your participants fight it out for top spot.
A Ready-Made Challenge
Evolt 360 Body Scanner owners are already ahead of other businesses because they can use the inbuilt, unique Challenge facilitator, housed within the Evolt Insights Management Dashboard platform. It has been designed to make the process seamless, quick and easy to use.
All you need to do is follow these easy steps –
- Create a New Challenge on the Challenge Tab in the Evolt Insights Management Dashboard
- Choose your Challenge Name, Start Date & Duration
- Generate your unique challenge code
- Distribute your challenge code to your participants
- Start scanning!
Run simultaneous challenges to different segments of your database simply by creating a new challenge for each and allocating unique codes.
For more information on how your client joins a challenge, check out our articles
How do I join a challenge with a code (found in the Evolt Active App Section)
https://knowledge.evolt360.com/knowledge/how-do-i-join-a-challange-with-a-code
How do I run a challenge
https://knowledge.evolt360.com/knowledge/how-do-i-pick-a-winner-in-a-challenge