Fitness challenges and gym contests are effective means of encouraging and motivating your gym members. After you've attracted them via your social media platforms, you'll want to retain them. They may be just what a certain member needs to pursue their fitness goals.
Furthermore, fitness contests and gym challenges can help to boost your gym’s retention rates while building of community around your brand. Also, the best gym challenges can help to boost brand loyalty.
And the good news is, you have plenty of options to choose from when it comes to fitness challenge ideas and gym challenge ideas. For instance, you can run fitness challenges on healthy eating and nutrition, stress management, functional movement, and weight loss, among others.
However, if you’ve never hosted gym challenges and workouts before, setting up one and running it successfully can feel overwhelming. So, where do you start? Which fitness contests or gym challenges do you choose? When is the best time to host a fitness challenge competition?
Well, we’ve done the heavy lifting for you and answered all the above questions. In this article, we will look at the benefits of hosting fitness challenges and contests, as well as tips for hosting gym challenges successfully. We’ve also compiled a list of some of the best fitness contests and gym challenges that you can run.
1. Benefits of Hosting Fitness Challenges and Contests
If you run a health and fitness club like a gym, yoga studio, or Pilates, hosting fitness challenges and fun exercise challenges will benefit both your gym and your members. Some of the benefits of running gym challenge workouts include:
1.1 Motivate Members
Gyms are usually full to the brim in January. But by the end of February, most of the new members that had joined had already quit. When they quit, your membership will also shrink, leading to a loss of revenue. And most people quit due to lack of motivation. Therefore, motivating your gym members should be an ongoing activity. Hosting gym challenges and contests regularly can provide an innovative and creative means of motivating your members. Monthly or weekly fitness challenges will give them the nudge they need to keep working out and achieve their desired results.
1.2 Attract and Retain Gym Members
Besides helping to motivate your gym members, fitness contests and workout challenges can also help to retain gym members. It’s also a great and effective method of attracting new members.
1.3 Enhance Your Fitness Credibility
Fitness challenges and gym contests will also provide you with an opportunity to educate members and participants about various things revolving around health and fitness. And this will significantly enhance your credibility as a fitness expert.
On top of that, the guidance and expertise that you provide during these challenges may be simply what the participants have been looking for to accomplish their fitness goals.
1.4 Leverage User-Generated Content
As mentioned earlier, you have plenty of options to choose from when it comes to exercise challenge ideas. For instance, you can opt to host fun physical challenges. You can then ask the participants to post the before and after workout photos on their social media pages, using a challenge hashtag. And with this method, you will end up with valuable and unique, user-generated content, which you can use to boost your brand’s online visibility.
2. Tips for Hosting a Fitness Challenge Successfully
Like everything else, the effectiveness and success of your fitness challenge will depend on how well you plan. Without proper planning, you will find it hard to achieve anything with your workout contests and challenges. Here are some tips that can guide you on how to host a successful fitness challenge:
2.1 Set a Goal
When coming up with fitness contest ideas for your gym, you first need to be clear on what you want to achieve. Your goals will determine how you set up the challenge.
For instance, you can decide to run weekly fitness challenges to motivate people to commit to a healthier lifestyle, generate new leads for your gym, grow your membership, boost brand loyalty or launch a new service.
2.2 Select a Challenge
After setting the goals that you intend to achieve with your fitness and health challenge, you then need to choose a contest that aligns best with your goals. And choosing the right contests for your fitness club is vital. You will need a challenge or contest that will immediately attract interest while making it clear for the participant to know what to expect.
To do this, you can lay out fun fitness challenge ideas, physical challenge ideas or gym competition ideas on your social media pages, and then let your audience choose the type of challenge they want to proceed with. The idea that generates the highest level of interest should be a clear choice.
After choosing the challenge, you will then need to decide how you will reward the winners. For instance, you can reward them with free memberships, cash prizes, personal training sessions or sponsored dinner with friends. From there, you should then set a timeframe for your fun fitness contests – long enough to ensure the participants get the most out of it, yet short enough to keep the motivation high.
2.3 Create Interest and Enthusiasm
At this point, you’ve already chosen your preferred fitness contest and finalized its details. From there, you should then find ways of building interest and engagement around your idea.
So, how do you go about this? Well, you can simply use social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Instagram posts, Facebook live streaming and leveraging Twitter influencers are all effective options. You just need to choose a method or platform that works best for you and your audience.
Make sure you also create a hashtag for your challenge. Also, you should encourage your members, social media followers and staff to share posts on their socials using a hashtag.
You can also use paid advertising to build more visibility and interest around your challenge, especially if you don’t have many followers on social media. But, don’t spend too much on advertising. A sponsored Facebook post or a simple retargeting campaign should do the job.
3. Fitness Contests and Challenges Ideas
As earlier mention, your options are almost endless when it comes to gym competition ideas and physical challenge ideas. For instance, you can host fitness challenges for groups, fitness challenges for friends, fitness challenges for corporates, Instagram fitness challenges, exercise challenges to do at home, family fitness challenges, and physical competitions for adults, among others. Below are a few ideas that you can work with:
3.1 Charity Fitness Challenges
If you are looking for corporate fitness challenge ideas, then you should consider running or hosting charity fitness challenges. Hosting a charity fitness challenge gives corporates an opportunity to donate to worthy causes while keeping the participants fit and healthy. It will also help to build brand awareness and reputation while enhancing your standing in the community. However, make sure you choose a charity that most corporates are willing to support. As for the challenges, they don’t have to be complicated. Miles for a charity challenge, weight loss challenge, or fun obstacle course can be enough.
3.2 Collective Gym Challenges
Collective gym challenges are designed for groups. The target groups can be family, friends, or co-workers. Some of the collective gym challenges that you can run include:
- Running challenges
- Most calories burned challenge
- Healthy eating challenge
- Most gym visits challenge
- Total weight lost challenge
3.3 Seasonal Gym Challenges and Contests
Whether it’s New Year, Valentine’s Day or summer, you can run fitness challenges and contests for almost every season. Some of the seasonal gym challenge ideas to consider include:
3.3.1 New Year Health and Fitness Challenge
Most people set fitness goals at the beginning of every year. And this provides you with a perfect opportunity to host a health and fitness challenge. For instance, you can run a 30-day plank challenge, 30-day strength training challenge, 30-day push-up challenge, or a two-week clearance challenge.
3.3.2 Valentine’s Day Couples Challenge
Valentine’s Day is all about love. But you make it even much better for your gym members by running a couple’s challenge some days before Valentine’s Day. It can be a mileage challenge, cardio-workout challenge, most steps covered or most calories burned challenge. You can then encourage the participating couples to track their performance using wearable technology. And at the end of the challenge, you can then sponsor the winning couple to a romantic dinner on Valentine’s Day.
3.3.3 Spring Muscle Up Challenge
When spring comes around, people rush back to the gyms, trying to get in shape for the summer holidays. So, during the months of April and May, you can run April fitness challenges, May workout challenges, may fitness challenges, where members compete with each other to build muscle. Such a challenge will not only bring more people back to the gym, but will also motivate the participants to push themselves to the limits, build upper body strength and improve their overall performance.
3.3.4 Summer Walking Challenge
Summer is all about getting out, exploring the city, taking long walks on the beach, going for hiking trips and just spending time outdoors. You can host a summer fitness challenge or a summer physical by encouraging your members to move more. Again, the participants can track the steps covered using wearable technology. By hosting a summer fitness contest or summer fitness challenge, you will encourage your community to remain active outside the gym while maintaining engagement throughout this low season.
4. Closing Remarks
Regardless of whether you host a collective challenge, charity challenge, seasonal challenge or a holiday fitness challenge, fitness challenges will go a long way in boosting your gym’s reputation, credibility, awareness and visibility. They will also provide the motivation some people need to start working out and accomplish their health and fitness goals.