As a gym owner, health club owner or fitness club owner, once you've managed to attract your gym members, keeping your gym members interested and engaged should be your primary goal, in order to retain them. Failure to do this some will end up canceling their memberships.
The problem is, when a single member cancels a membership, it may cost your gym as much as $500 in revenue annually, for every dropped membership. And as you may probably know, acquiring a new client for your gym or fitness studio doesn’t come cheap.
Therefore, keeping your members motivated, engaged and interested should be a continuous process. One of the easiest ways of achieving this is by running weight loss challenges, weight loss contests, weight-loss competitions and workout weight loss challenges.
Fitness challenges and fun weight loss challenges are powerful tools for increasing engagement in your gym and boosting retention. At the end of the day, we all love fun and rewards right?
In this article, we will walk you through the benefits of hosting weight loss challenges as well as how to create and run weight loss challenges. We have also compiled a list of weight loss challenge ideas, which you can implement right away.
1. Benefits of Hosting Weight Loss Challenges
As mentioned above, hosting weight loss challenges, weight-loss competitions and weight loss contests is a powerful means of boosting your gym’s engagement. Here are the key benefits of hosting fitness challenges in your gym:
1.1 Boost Gym Membership
Weight loss challenges, contests and competitions are effective marketing tools. Besides helping to motivate your current members, they can also help to introduce new members. For instance, you can hold a weight loss fitness challenge, where you encourage your existing members to bring their friends who are non-members. And once the challenge is over, you can then follow up on the non-members who participated in the contest. And chances are, you will end up signing new members from this contest, especially if they enjoyed the challenge.
1.2 Motivate and Encourage Members
One of the main benefits of hosting a weight loss challenge or any other fitness competition is that it will help to motivate the participants – whether all the participants are members or some are non-members.
When you have a group of people working towards a common goal, they will keep pushing and supporting each other. And there’s a high chance that each of them will achieve their goals. On the other hand, if the different participants are chasing these goals individually, there’s a high chance that some will drop out.
Furthermore, hosting a weight loss challenge for friends, an office weight loss challenge or a weight loss challenge for couples, will allow you to interact and engage with your members. And this is not always possible under normal workout situations, considering that different people work out at different times of the day.
1.3 Hold Your Clients Accountable
Most fitness challenges and weight loss competitions have a goal, which the members have to achieve within a certain date. For instance, it can be a workout challenge to lose weight or a diet challenge for weight loss.
Such challenges will encourage your members or the participants to track their progress. You can then use their progress reports to hold them accountable. And when they see how far they’ve come and the progress they’ve made, they will be motivated to keep on track.
1.4 Promotes Membership Retention
As noted above, running a weight loss challenge will allow both you and the members to track their progress. And if members make notable progress during the challenge, there’s a high chance they will stick with your gym or your personal training regime. Furthermore, these members may also encourage their friends, colleagues, family members or other people within their social networks to join your gym, going by its high success rate. Thanks to these weight loss fitness challenges, you will not only be boosting client retention but you will also be growing your membership.
1.5 Provides Guidance and Structure
Whenever you are creating a weight loss challenge, you will need to provide the workout structure to your members. The structure will feature the details of the workout.
For instance, it can feature things like the number of reps, number of sets, duration per set, resting period as well as overall duration per workout session.
By having a clear workout structure, the participants will just show up for the session, give it their best and get it done. If left to figure out such details on their own, some people will opt to skip the session altogether.
1.6 Establish Yourself as a Competent Trainer
Exercise and working out can be intimidating for most people, more so, beginners. And with millions of articles and fitness videos on various online platforms, choosing the right workout method can be hard for most people.
Therefore, when they join your fitness challenge, they are relying on you to guide them and help them make the right workout decisions.
Also, they are relying on you to teach them how to properly execute various workouts. And if the participants see results as a result of your training strategies, you will eventually establish yourself as a reliable, knowledgeable and competent fitness trainer.
2. Creating and Running Weight Loss Challenges
Proper planning and execution are vital when it comes to running challenges for weight loss. If properly planned, your workout challenges to lose weight will be successful. Consequently, your gym’s popularity will grow.
On the other, if the challenge turns out to be a failure due to poor planning, your fitness center may lose memberships. Furthermore, you may also find it hard to attract new memberships in the future. Here are some tips that will help you to launch a successful healthy weight loss challenge:
- Define your goals and objectives clearly.
- Choose the type of challenge that you intend to run.
- Decide on the duration of the challenge.
- Set the rules and guidelines of your weight loss challenge.
- Create promotional materials.
- Open the registrations for the challenge.
- Launch the challenge.
- Award the winners and collect feedback.
Regardless of whether you are running a weekly weight loss challenge, 30-day weight loss challenge, office weight loss challenge, couples weight loss challenge, or friends weight loss challenge, the above tips will help you to set up and run a weight loss challenge successfully.
3. Weight Loss Challenge Ideas
You have plenty of options to choose from when it comes to weight loss challenge ideas, weight loss contest ideas and weight loss competition ideas. The type of challenge that you choose will depend on what you want to achieve as well as your target audience. Here are some weight loss challenge ideas to consider:
3.1 Transformation Challenge
A transformation challenge is one of the most effective weight loss challenges that you can run in your fitness studio. A transformation challenge will be a holistic fitness plan, targeting muscle building, burning fat and building strength.
A body transformation challenge should run for approximately two to three months. This will give the participants ample time to master the workout routine and meet their transformation goals.
3.2 Running or Walking Challenges
Walking and running challenges can also help with weight loss. Furthermore, it’s a straightforward challenge to put together. It will be an ideal workout challenge to lose weight for couples, corporates, friends, workgroups and as well as individuals.
For this challenge, you can set a particular number of miles, which the participants should have attained by a specific timeframe. You will simply need to request the participants to wear fitness trackers, which you can then use to check the miles the different participants have logged.
3.3 Healthy Eating Challenge
Healthy weight loss and healthy eating go hand in hand. With this challenge, you will be encouraging the participants to make healthy food choices, whether they are at home, at the office or even out with their friends. As for the rules, they can include eating a particular number of vegetable and fruit portions every day as well as removing junk food from their diets.
3.4 Calories Burned Challenge
This is probably the most straightforward workout challenge to lose weight. Also, it’s more flexible than other challenges, since the participants have the freedom to choose the type of exercise to do. For instance, the participants can run, walk, swim, lift weights, cycle or simply follow any healthy workout routine, which will help them to lose weight.
4. Rewarding Your Weight Loss Challenge Participants
Once your weight loss challenge ends, you will need to announce and award the winners. So, which is the best prize to award the winner? The answer to this question will depend on the type of challenge you were running and your target audience. Here are some weight loss challenge prize ideas and weight loss competition prize ideas to consider.
- Free personal training sessions for 30 days.
- Gift cards and cash.
- Free gym merchandise like water bottles or training gear.
- Fitness shopping giveaway.
- Free gym membership to non-members.
- Healthy recipe book.
- Free workout gear like fitness trackers.
- Sponsored romantic dinners for couples.
5. Closing Remarks
Weight loss challenges are a powerful means of getting new clients, growing your membership, and keeping your gym members motivated. And with proper planning, you can easily come up with a weight loss challenge, which can provide the necessary support that the participants need to accomplish their goals. Simply put, it’s a win-win scenario for everyone.
Remember to make it fun!