The benefits of a walkathon land in three places at once.
Walkers get better heart health, a lift in mood, and leg strength without the joint impact of running. Teams get a shared goal that crosses departments. And because a walking event needs almost no equipment or venue, organizers get all of it at close to no cost.
The benefit that makes the rest possible, though, is participation, and that is where most wellness initiatives fail.
Walking asks for no skill, no kit and no gym, so uptake tends to beat anything gym-based: when POSOCO ran a two-week walkathon on Vantage Fit, the challenge saw around 97% participation. MindPoint Group recorded the same 97% on a two-week walkathon of its own, so it is not a one-off.
Let’s dive in and look at each of those benefits properly, along with what it takes to run a walkathon of your own.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- A walkathon is a walking event run over a fixed period, where employees log steps toward an individual or team goal.
- Participation is the standout benefit: POSOCO saw around 97% participation, 11 million+ steps, and 161 km covered per participant in two weeks.
- Walking is the most inclusive activity you can pick: low-impact, self-paced, and open to every fitness level, which is why uptake beats gym-based challenges.
- The seven benefits below span health, community, cost, gamification, habit-building, engagement, and awareness.
- To run one, you need five things: a tracking platform, a clear goal, promotion, rewards, and a follow-up challenge to hold the momentum.
What is a walkathon, and how does it work?
A walkathon runs over a fixed window. Participants walk in their own time and place, their steps are logged to a shared platform, and a leaderboard shows how everyone is tracking against the goal. Nobody has to be in the same location at the same time, which is the whole reason it scales.
Walkathon or walk-a-thon? Both spellings are correct and mean the same thing. You will also see “walk-a-thon” and “walk a thon” used interchangeably, in the same way marathon gave us the “-athon” ending.
How long does one last? Anywhere from a week to three months. Cotiviti ran a week-long walkathon for 540 employees, while Complii Fintech stretched theirs across three months. Two to four weeks is the most common choice: long enough for a routine to form, short enough that people can see the finish.
Individually or in teams? Either. Individual leaderboards suit smaller groups. Teams tend to work better at scale, because a strong week from one colleague carries the people having a harder time.
Companies run them for different reasons: to back a cause, such as raising awareness of heart disease; to encourage better health among employees; or simply to make a daily walk feel like a game worth playing. Whichever the motivation, the mechanics are the same, and the payoff shows up in two places. Employees walk more regularly, and the organization sees the engagement and productivity that follows.
Here is how that breaks down.
7 Ways A Walkathon Benefits Your Organization
Benefit 1: Wide-Ranging Health Benefits
It’s an easy physical activity that provides a wide range of health benefits. The benefits of walking are not only physical but mental too.
- Reduced the risk of heart disease, i.e., cardiovascular diseases.
- Helps to lose weight.
- Walking strengthens your joints.
- Improves sleep patterns.
- Boosts mood by lowering stress levels.
None of this is folklore. The US Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans tell adults to get at least 150 to 300 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity a week, and name brisk walking as the example. At the lower end, that is 30 minutes on five days. Meeting it is linked to lower risk of heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and depression.
Harvard Health reports that people walking around 8,000 steps a day tend to live longer than those walking 4,000, and that walking speed makes little difference to that effect.
That last point matters more than it looks. Because pace is not the variable, a walkathon stays genuinely low-impact: it builds leg and hip strength without loading the knees and ankles the way running or a gym challenge does.
Employees returning from injury, older employees, and complete beginners can all take part at their own pace without being outclassed.
30 minutes of brisk walking is helpful for people struggling to lose weight, blood pressure problems, joint pains, and mental health issues like anxiety, depression, etc.
Benefit 2: Sense Of Community
Walk-a-thons, though are about achieving individual goals, is a team activity of sorts. In a team, healthy competition is vital for team members to build respect for each other.
It enables everyone to see each other as peers by providing an equal playing field.
The anticipation and rewards can act as strong motivators for employees to bond together.
Part of it is influenced by the feeling of working towards a common goal. Ultimately, this will improve their teamwork by making them better team players.
Team framing is what turns a solo habit into a social one. Landmark Group ran a 30-day virtual walkathon across six in-house teams and got more than 5,000 employees participating. At that scale, the inter-team rivalry does the motivating for you.
If you go the team route, spend a few minutes on step challenge team names before launch; a group that has named itself shows up differently.
Benefit 3: Easy To Organize
Walk-a-thons are extremely easy to host and organize. Being a group-oriented activity, it is the perfect health event that businesses can hold.
Additionally, minimal resources required make it a relatively cheap event to host.
To deliver a more appealing experience, consider using some great corporate wellness apps such as Vantage Fit.
Vantage Fit hosts regular company-wide walk-a-thons with creative themes, varying step goals, and easy tracking. The only manual thing for you to do is to decide when to conduct this physical activity.
POSOCO is a good illustration of what “easy to organize” buys you. Their two-week challenge, run under the name “Walking Miles, Losing Inches”, pulled in 72+ participants at around 97% participation, who between them covered more than 11 million steps and burned 520,260+ Kcal, an average of 161 km per person. No venue, no equipment budget, no event-day logistics.
If you want to compare it against other formats before committing, our guide to running a wellness challenge breaks down the options.
Benefit 4: Gamification
One reason people tend to avoid physical activity is that there is no instant gratification in it.
To lose weight or to see health benefits takes time. And by the time that it shows, people have already lost interest.
Gamification is the process of turning an everyday activity, such as exercising regularly, into a game of sorts. For “every level” cleared, there is some reward. It satisfies the need for instant appreciation that makes people stick to the very end.
Walkathons can be made very engaging through the use of gamification. For example, completing a set number of steps awards specific points or seeing one’s name on the company leaderboard. These are some of the features that Vantage Fit happens to offer to truly gamify the fitness process for the walkathon participants (your employees).
Since COVID-19 hit, the world has welcomed unconventional things like working from home and virtual meetings. With it, the power of social media grew stronger than ever. Vantage Fit additionally offers a feature wherein the users can share the badges or workout duration within the app, just like other social media platforms.
Benefit 5: Form Habits
You will often hear that it takes 21 days to build a habit. It is worth knowing that the figure has no research behind it. It comes from a 1960 self-help book, where the author noted how long plastic-surgery patients took to adjust to their new appearance. Habit-formation research since then points to considerably longer, and to wide variation between people.
What matters more for a walkathon is the direction of travel while it runs. In SRS Medical’s month-long Step It Up! challenge, average step count per employee rose 19.37% in the final two weeks. People were walking more at the end than at the start, not coasting to the finish. That is the pattern you want, because it means the routine is taking hold rather than being endured.
Once your employees see the benefits of walking by themselves, they will be further motivated to make a lifestyle change. With time, your employees will notice the improving physical health and mental clarity that regular exercising brings.
Benefit 6: Better Engagement
Walking is a physical activity that not only improves physical health but decreases stress as well.
A session of 30 minutes of walking every day can improve serotonin levels, boost mood, and disperse stress.
A happy mindset that regular exercise brings contributes to an employee feeling more energized and engaged. Not only will productivity rise but also control the feeling of burnout. All in all, hosting a walkathon benefits your employees’ holistic wellness.
DLA Plus saw 87% of employees take part in a three-week winter step challenge, the kind of figure you only get when people opt in rather than get enrolled. Engagement holds better still when the walkathon is not a one-off. Pairing it with a rolling step challenge or tying completion to rewards for fitness gives people a reason to keep the habit past the finish line.
Benefit 7: Raise Awareness
To truly promote employee wellness, you must be able to advocate it properly. Hosting walk-a-thons are a perfect starting point to kickstart your corporate wellness program.
Walk-a-thons are more accessible for everyone to participate in and because people see walking as an achievable feat.
Your employees are more likely to start their health journey with an easy task than a gym challenge. It is the perfect medium to make employees more aware of their health and encourage them to upkeep it.
Awareness also works outward.
Because walkathons started as charity events, the fundraising mechanics are well understood and easy to bolt on: pick a cause, let participants collect pledges per kilometer or per 10,000 steps from friends and family (our guide to running a step challenge for charity covers the pledge structure in more detail), and publish the running total alongside the step leaderboard.
You get the wellness outcome and a visible community contribution from the same event, at close to no extra cost.
How to organize a walkathon
Knowing the benefits is the easy part. Actually running one comes down to five decisions.
1. Pick the tracking platform first
Everything else depends on this. At minimum the platform has to read real-time activity and reliably confirm whether someone logged their steps, plus pace and distance. Without trustworthy tracking you have no leaderboard, and without a leaderboard you have a mailing list, not a challenge.
It is worth choosing something broader than a pure step tracker. A platform that also logs yoga, meditation, water and meals lets you run the follow-up challenge on the same tool instead of onboarding everyone twice.
2. Set one concrete goal
A walkathon with no number attached goes stale in about a week. Make the target specific and finite: 6,000 steps a day for five working days, or 3 km a day for a fortnight. Landmark Group escalated theirs week by week: 4,000, then 6,000, then 8,000, then 10,000 steps, which keeps the goal moving without ever feeling out of reach.
Decide up front whether you are ranking individuals or teams. Teams are more forgiving for the least active participants, since a strong week from one colleague carries the group.
3. Promote it before it starts, not on day one
Announce it with enough lead time for people to plan around it, and keep it visible while it runs. Internal channels do most of the work, but posting publicly has a second effect: it signals to candidates and peer companies that you fund this kind of thing.
4. Attach a real reward
Rewards are what move people who would not otherwise take part. Points redeemable against gift cards work well because they are tangible and don’t require a prize-giving ceremony. Recognize more than the top step count. Most improved, most consistent, and best team all give people who will never win outright a reason to stay in.
5. Line up what comes next
The week after a walkathon ends is where the habit is won or lost. Have the next thing ready, whether that is a virtual run, a hydration challenge or a nutrition streak, so momentum transfers instead of evaporating. Variety is the point; the same challenge on repeat stops working.
If you need a number to anchor the goal, Harvard Health reports that walking around 8,000 steps a day is associated with living longer than walking 4,000, and that going up to 12,000 adds only a small further benefit. A target in that range is defensible; anything higher is arbitrary.
Final Thoughts
Looking at all the fundraising pages, the thought of successfully hosting any wellness event, including a walkathon, may be intriguing. It can be just the perfect fundraiser event for your organization’s and employees’ well-being.
So, if you haven’t started planning a walkathon yet, then what’s stopping you? For a seamless experience, take the assistance of a corporate wellness application like Vantage Fit. In doing so, you can promote your event better and reap the benefits of a successful walkathon.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many minutes of walking is good for health?
Walking for at least 30 minutes daily is more than enough to maintain overall good health. Those who cannot walk for 30 minutes at once can briskly walk for 10 minutes and gradually increase their walking duration.
Which is better - walking or going to the gym?
Walking may offer more health benefits than the gym. However, to enjoy the walking benefits properly, one has to brisk walk regularly for an extended period of time.
What happens when you walk every day?
Here is what happens when you walk every day: You will be less prone to chronic disorders like heart disease, thyroid, and diabetes. You are less likely to gain weight easily. Your body will have ample amounts of happy hormones. You will experience increased productivity. Your friends, family will feel motivated to take up physical activity seriously.
How does a walkathon work?
A walkathon runs over a fixed period, commonly two weeks to a month, during which participants log their steps toward a set goal, either individually or as part of a team. Steps are tracked automatically through a wellness app synced to each participant’s phone or wearable, and progress appears on a shared leaderboard. Participants walk at their own pace, in their own time and location, so no one has to be in the same place at once. At the end, results are totaled and rewards go out. In charity walkathons, participants also collect pledges based on the distance or steps they complete.
How do you organize a workplace walkathon?
Five steps. First, choose a platform that tracks steps, pace and distance in real time. Second, set one concrete goal, such as 6,000 steps a day for a working week, and decide whether you are ranking individuals or teams. Third, promote it internally before it launches so people can plan around it. Fourth, attach a reward, and recognize consistency and improvement rather than only the highest step count. Fifth, have the next challenge ready for the week after it ends so the habit carries over. A two-week window is a good default for a first attempt.
