Why are fitness challenges important and how can you make them more engaging?

As a trainer, it can really be difficult to boost your client’s morale in sticking to a healthy regime. No matter how many schedules and strict deadlines you set up for them, it eventually gets them nowhere unless they are held accountable for their health choices. In order to ensure your clients are motivated enough to join your fitness classes, a fitness challenge can be useful. They are not just fun but also a more engaging way of boosting your client’s intrinsic as well as extrinsic motivation. 

A fitness challenge can help your client in keeping up with their fitness goals in several ways. 

1. Firstly, they will feel more connected by being a part of a like-minded fitness community. They will enjoy a sense of relatedness by sharing common goals with others. In fact, if these fitness challenges are an option they can pick up with family members, it can often make them feel more motivated towards reaching their final fitness goal. 
2. Since it’s your client who will decide whether they want to participate in a challenge or not, it will actually give them a sense of autonomy for choosing healthy habits over unhealthy ones. 
3. With too much health information available on the web, it becomes difficult for your client to decide whether they want to stick with your training or not. By arranging challenges time and again, you’ll actually be helping them in understanding your training methods and trusting your capabilities at the same time. 

How can you make your fitness challenges more engaging?

Most of the time, we’ve seen trainers spending a lot of time in creating a challenge for their clients. But, if you don’t make them engaging enough, you’ll land up with no participants. 

Firstly, you need to decide why you want to host a fitness challenge. Is it just for boosting the motivation of your existing clients or do you want to use this for creating a group class of your own? No matter the purpose, here are some ways you can make your challenges more engaging. 

Opt for a hashtag contest

You can create a hashtag of your own for the challenge and encourage your clients to use it on social media. That way, you will not just boost participation but also develop your overall social media presence at the same time. If required, you can also go for a prize for the person with the most number of posts under that specific hashtag to add a sense of competitiveness in your clients. 

Go for a long duration challenge

Challenges need not be for a short span all the time. You can also opt for a long duration challenge that will encourage your clients to build healthier habits in the long run. These could be anything from a weight loss contest for 90 days to a healthy habit contest for 21 days. Eventually, with these long duration challenges, your clients will be able to build up a habit that would have been difficult to attain otherwise. 

Give prizes

No matter how many challenges you set up, you must have a budget to give prizes to the winner. This will add more fun, excitement, as well as competitiveness in your participants and help them keep up with the challenge requirement. You could either opt for a product or even extend your services to your clients as prizes for these challenges. 

Use graphics to add more substance

The way you market your challenge can always define how serious you are in doing them. By using exciting and professional graphics for promotion, you can easily get more traffic for your posts and also increase participation for your contests at the same time. 

Themed contests can add more fun

Whether it’s a walking week or a journal week, you can encourage more participation and engagement with themed contests. This will make the entire challenge more exciting as well as fun for your clients. 

Track progress periodically

Whenever you set up a challenge, it’s crucial to track progress for your clients and see whether they are actually doing it diligently or not. This will also help your clients keep up with the pace and improve their progress as the challenge continues. 

With that said, we think the key to an engaging fitness challenge lies entirely in how well you stay connected with your clients. With our platform Routine, we are aiming to give fitness trainers an opportunity for not just maintaining an online portfolio but also improve overall client engagement with features that include hosting fitness challenges.