Office Fitness Challenge: 8 Fun And Exciting Ideas You Should Try

Technology is making everything more accessible and more convenient, but with it, the lifestyles of corporate employees are becoming increasingly sedentary. Sedentary lifestyles have been related to higher risks of health problems and diseases later on in life. As such, employers need to ensure the proper health and wellbeing of their employees.

The first step to ensure proper employee health is to create a corporate wellness program. Corporate wellness programs allow employers to promote good health behaviors among their employees and encourage them to adopt and maintain healthy lifestyles. They facilitate the implementation of wellness challenges and regular exercise, and proper nutrition among an organization's workforce.

Wellness challenges can be designed around health aspects such as exercise, nutrition, meditation, etc.

Organizing fitness challenges, i.e., activities that improve employee fitness levels, is a great way of improving employee health. Office fitness challenges are team-building exercises to engage employees on a journey to be healthier and fitter.

In my previous article, I wrote about the fundamentals of creating a weight loss challenge for employees. A weight-loss challenge is just a type of workplace wellness challenge that can be done in the office.

Office Fitness Challenge: The Bridge To Employee Health and Wellness

There are many benefits to creating a workplace fitness challenge. Not only will employees love participating in one, but they will also learn many things which will help them maintain healthy lives.

Here are just a few benefits of creating an office fitness challenges-

• Increased Energy
• Increased Motivation
• Decreased Absenteeism
• Improved Morale
• Increased Employee Engagement
• Improved Employee Health

Understanding the Basics

When creating a fitness challenge for your employees, it is important to keep these things in mind -

Promote

Before you set your fitness challenge live, you need to do some health promotions in your workplace.

• You must educate your employees on the physical, mental, and emotional benefits of physical activity and healthy eating.

• You need to encourage employees to adopt healthy habits such as exercising regularly, eating healthy meals, etc.

• Also, send promotional flyers via email to every employee and ask them to participate.

Execute

• Decide what kind of fitness challenge you want to create. Ask your employees to give their feedback.

• Set the main objective and goal of your fitness challenge.

• Determine if you want it to be a team challenge or an individual one.

• Frame your fitness challenge according to the goal you have set.

• Set the rules and choose the duration you want the challenge to run.

• Keep track of your employees’ progress and keep motivating them.

• Reward employees for participation with prizes. You can give out lucrative prizes for the winners as well.

Ideas For A Great Office Fitness Challenge

Here are some office fitness challenge ideas to make yours a successful and engaging one -

1. Cycle-to-work Challenge

A cycle-to-work challenge is a great way to promote fitness and reduce pollution at the same time. The aim of the challenge will be to cycle to work for a set number of days. The employees who ride their cycles to work can be rewarded with healthy lunches or healthy breakfasts.

You can also extend the challenge to a span of 30 days or 60 days, where the employees who cycle the most can be rewarded with lucrative prizes.

2. The Workplace Walkathon Challenge

A step challenge or a walkathon is a specific challenge where participants must walk a certain amount of steps daily. Participation in a walking challenge is effortless and convenient. You can also modify the challenge as per your requirements.

Set the number of steps you want as the standard of the challenge. For example, your employees can walk either 5000 steps or 10000 steps a day. Incentivize the challenge by providing small gifts for completing the daily step count.

Also, you can set the challenge for a set period, where employees who walk the most steps win a grand prize and a title such as "Walker of the month."

3. The 7-Minute Workout Challenge

A 7-minute workout challenge is a great way to keep your employees motivated and fit. The workout consists of a set of exercises with brief rest periods in between, running for a total duration of 7 minutes, as the name suggests. Participating in a 7-minute workout is a great way to lose fat and keep your employees’ fitness levels high.

You can easily design and implement a 7-minute workout for your workforce with a fitness app. Vantage Fit, our very own corporate wellness app, can help you to quickly introduce your employees to a practical 7-minute workout challenge and many more. It also allows you to reward your employees with points that can be redeemed for real prizes.

4. Stair Climbing Challenge

If your office is in a multi-storied building, you can create a stair climbing challenge among your employees. If everything goes well, your employees might completely avoid using the elevator!

Set a daily target of stairs to climb for your employees to achieve. Reward employees who climb the highest number of stairs or who complete the target in the fastest time.

5. The Plank Challenge

The Plank is one of the most effective core-strength training exercises, and almost anyone can do it. Doing a plank has many benefits, such as strengthening the abdominal muscles, relieving stress, and improving posture. It is also great in the sense that it requires no equipment or weight to be completed.

Create a plank challenge among your employees to create a healthy and fun competition among them. Set a minimum duration that every participant has to complete and increase the duration gradually. At the end of the challenge, reward your employees with a healthy snack each to keep them motivated.

6. The "New Day, New Workout" Challenge

Spice your fitness challenge up by creating an office workout challenge wherein employees have to do a new workout every day. Such a challenge can ensure that employees are working out all their muscle groups and are optimally fit.

At the end of each day of the challenge, you can choose to reward your employees with healthy lunches to ensure the optimal replenishment of nutrients in their bodies.

To ensure you have no difficulty choosing different exercises for each workout, I have enlisted several effective and proven office exercises in my article - 42 Office Exercises You Can Do At Your Desk To Stay Fit.

7. Lifestyle challenge

The idea of a lifestyle challenge is to create different health-related tasks daily and encourage your employees to partake in them. For example, one day, you can do a water drinking challenge, and then the next day you can do a healthy lunch eating challenge.

This kind of challenge can be done over a shorter duration, such as one week or two. Reward all participants with small prizes and the one who participates for the most days with an attractive prize.

8. Challenge for Charity

A great way to make every employee participate in a corporate fitness challenge is to create a challenge for a charity purpose.

Sign up your team for a charity event in your locality. Many such events, such as marathons, are held, which raise money and awareness for causes like breast cancer, aids, etc.

Thank your employees for participating in a just cause and reward them by taking them out to a meal.

So, go ahead and promote the best health behaviors among your employees by using these effective fitness challenge ideas for work.