Many Americans do not get the recommended amount of exercise per week. Unfortunately, this lack of exercise can also affect productivity and success at work. Mid-day exercise is proven to boost performance and productivity while increasing overall wellness. Use these group fitness challenge ideas to get your office or business team moving while boosting morale and teamwork.
This is the easiest and cheapest group fitness challenge to implement. Better yet, it takes less than 5 minutes each day. Set a time each day between meetings or at lunchtime and encourage your team members to take part. For the plank challenge, start by trying to hold the plank for 30 seconds. As this becomes easier start increasing the time by 10 seconds each day. For the push-up challenge, set a 1-minute timer and see how many push-ups you can do in that minute. Record everyone’s score on a spreadsheet so they can see how much they improve over the weeks.
By making exercise fun you can help encourage your office team members to participate. Consider putting together a walking club, or a sports team. Encourage the group to get together several times a week during lunch breaks or after work. You can even plan to walk to dinner or lunch meetings to encourage those who might not see the point. During winter consider planning outings to ice skating rinks or a trampoline park for a break from the monotony. For these planned outings ask your team what activities they would enjoy, and aim to have them not revolve around drinking or food if possible.
Many of your team are probably already tracking their steps on their smartwatches, so participating in a step challenge won’t require extra effort on their part. Consider inviting other departments to participate and making it a team contest rather than an individual one. This allows you to offer better incentives such as a catered lunch for the winning department. Set up a spreadsheet to track employees’ steps daily to find the collective amount of steps each week per department. To determine the winner, set a timeframe or a total amount of steps to hit.
Organizing a team to participate in a charity event helps you to raise money for a good cause and encourage movement. Look at the 5K run/walks in your area and then start to put a team together to participate. Encourage your employees to participate by offering an incentive such as an after-run lunch. If there are no events happening, consider signing up for CharityWalks where team members can log their steps to earn money for various charities.
Some meetings require sitting, however, discussions and brainstorming sessions could happen while walking. Furthermore, one-on-one discussions could also happen as you walk, or encourage employees to head outside to have these discussions. To make this a challenge, ask each department to book as many walking meetings as possible and give a prize to the most active department at the end of the month. Exercise can help to increase blood flow which can lead to better ideas and more creativity. If walking meetings aren’t possible, consider investing in a few desk treadmills so employees can walk while on a video or conference call.
Group fitness challenge ideas are great to get your team moving while building team rapport and competition. Encouraging team members to exercise more allows you to support them and their wellness thus creating a healthy and safe work environment.
