Incentfit loves wellness challenges — and step challenges specifically! Walking is a low intensity activity and it’s an easy way to add more exercise into your daily routine. However, stretching your step challenge for an extended period of time can get a little boring. Here are 6 reasons why you shouldn’t let your step challenges last longer than 6 weeks:
It’s hard to catch up after a while
After a certain amount of time, the people who get ahead are impossible to keep up with! This discourages others and kills the competitive spirit for the majority of participants.
Your progress plateaus
Step challenges can really help sedentary employees be more conscious of movement. After a while though, you realistically can’t walk any more in a day, and it stops being a challenge.
It leaves out other participants
For those who don’t chose to participate in the step challenge, it can leave them out of a corporate fitness activity for quite a while. Changing the challenge up every month or so can make sure that there is something that all employees will get to enjoy.
It’s time consuming
Committing to a step challenge for a month isn’t too bad. A few extra steps here. A relaxing Sunday hike there. Yet walking as a main form of exercise to compete in a challenge can eat away at time that you can use for other forms of fitness.
We need to keep our bodies guessing
Over time, our body starts feeling the effects of our fitness routine less and less. This is because our body gets used to the exercise, and learns to consume less energy.
It gets old
Let’s be honest, focusing on only your steps for more than a month gets boring. We see this in our data too, with long step challenges showing heavy user attrition after 6 weeks.
Step challenges are great for both newbie exercisers and fitness junkies. However extended step challenges become less effective over time! Having trouble creating new and engaging fitness challenges for your employees? Reach out to us at Incentfit. We’re chock full of ideas and our AutoPilot program will create and run interesting new challenges for you!