A step challenge could be a health challenge whereby staff contends against one another by walking a pre-established number of steps throughout the day. The challenge is formed with the assistance of a fitness pursuit app that mechanically registers the number of steps your employees have walked in an exceedingly day. In addition, staff will track every other’s progress in a leaderboard, creating motivation and competition.
Walking is the most straightforward physical activity that folks of all ages and fitness levels can do.
Get People Moving With Step Challenge
Getting and staying active does not need to include gym subscriptions, expensive devices, or complicated exercises. It can be as easy as strolling. Moving is important to your physical and psychological health– especially if you find yourself sitting a lot throughout the day. Your activities for the rest of your day are equally essential to what you perform in your challenge.
See: Workplace Corporate Health & Wellness Programs
Step Challenge Objectives
Set a goal to walk at least 7,500 to 10,000 steps daily. Get into a habit of a 30-minute walk during weekdays. The idea that you must take 10,000 steps a day is now universally accepted. However, there’s, in fact, absolutely nothing naturally special about that number. It’s more what it represents- specifically, getting out of your chair and moving.
So do not be disappointed if you can’t reach 10,000 steps every day. The health benefits of walking level off at about 7,500 steps a day, according to a 2019 JAMA Internal Medicine study.
And bear in mind that the strength of your walks matters, too. The Exercise Guidelines for Americans recommend a minimum of 150 to 300 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity like brisk walking each week. That’s why it’s important to take a 30-minute walk a minimum of 5 times a week.
See: How To Achieve Your Wellness Goals
Step Challenge Health Benefits
- Easier on the Joints
Walking includes a low impact on the joints, so it is a good exercise for people with issues or pain in their joints. Walking is also an excellent exercise for individuals with joint pain due to its low price and may be done anywhere. Walking can even be an excellent method for athletes who are disabled to continue obtaining the exercise they need. As one thing that’s easy on the joints, going for frequent walks will enable them to remain mobile, whereas they’re convalescent from their injury with no need to fret regarding compromising their condition.
Exercise, in general, can assist you in keeping your blood pressure at ordinary, lower rates. Luckily, walking is enclosed in this spectrum, and you don’t even have to be compelled to walk for long-distance. If you’re having trouble finding or creating the time to urge adequate exercise, walking for simply three separate times every day can help you keep your blood pressure low. Walking is an exercise that may assist you in keeping your blood pressure at ordinary, lower rates.
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- Heart Health
Your heart health is unbelievably vital to your overall health, which suggests you would like to listen to any or all diseases and diseases that may damage your heart. Frequent walks can keep several of these diseases and conditions at bay, together with high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes. In addition, regular walking is one of the most effective belongings you can do for your heart and prevent cardiovascular disease from developing.
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- Bone health
Osteoporosis is a severe condition that causes the bones to weaken and brittle. Whereas there’s no cure for osteoporosis, there are various things you will do to strengthen your bones, together with walking. Walking is taken into account as a weight-bearing exercise, which suggests it puts weight on the bones. Once doing a weight-bearing exercise, you’re fighting against gravity to place pressure on the bones, which forces the bones to work a lot and gain strength.
Walking is easy on the joints, so. In contrast, individuals with osteoporosis don’t have to worry about damaging their bones; they’ll still burn calories and find the exercise everybody needs.
- Increase longevity
Staying healthy could be a crucial half of living an extended and happy life. However, you don’t have to be compelled to be running marathons into your seventies to reap the advantages of staying active.
For many people, obtaining 20 minutes of walking is easy. However, taking a pet for a walk or simply strolling around the block for a few relaxations could be an excellent way to urge the exercise you would like to measure length.
- Manage Your Weight
You don’t have to go on starvation diets or extreme exercise to start losing weight. Simply walking may be enough to ascertain many pounds drop away. Once you walk for extended periods, you’ll be able to realize that walking helps jump start your weight loss program and should even assist you in walking off a whole pants size in only a few weeks.
See: The Mediterranean Diet For Weight Loss & Heart Health
- Fat Burner
Once we’re trying to lose some pounds, burning fat is one of the most important priorities we could have. Several folks who suffer from excess body fat got that method due to a scarcity of exercise and movement. Luckily, it isn’t tough to start losing weight, and it just takes many days of brisk walking. Walking is typically used a lot as a supplement to a more intense exercising setup. Whereas walking will assist you to lose excess fat, you almost certainly aren’t attending to get the body of your dreams from walking alone. Brisk walking can help you stop belly fat from growing or from gaining fat.
See: Weight Training for Bone & Muscle Strength
- Easier For Overweight People
Frequent walking could be an excellent exercise for anyone trying to begin a weight loss plan or workout regimen, significantly for those presently overweight. Walking is a straightforward method for people who are overweight to urge the movement and exercise they need. As walking gets more accessible, they’ll begin cardiopulmonary training or running to promote weight loss and going in shape.
- Reduces Stress
Walking can cut back stress in an exceeding range of ways, together with setting your mind into a musing state, boost endorphins, and provides you more energy—the stress-reducing edges of walking increase even more if you step outside or bring an acquaintance along. Once you walk, you are getting exercise whereas still taking the time to understand your surroundings, which might enable you to ditch your stresses and worries, catch up with an acquaintance in an exceedingly non-stressful environment, and find the advantages of a decent exercise.
- Reduces Depression
Brisk walking facilitates managing stress is incredibly kind of like how it can help fight depression. Simply a twenty-minute walk daily can help reduce depression symptoms.
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Step challenge at the workplace
You can separate your employees into teams giving decent targets for their step challenges. Groups can sync their steps with the wellness corner through apps like GoogleFit, FitBit, etc., to get a detailed activity photo of people and groups. The winning group gets interesting deals like points on the app to acquire merchandise.
- Separate people into groups
A healthy spirit of competition can bring out grit and determination. People with these traits are valuable to a business.
- Set goals
Folks are probably to follow through on objectives that they set for themselves. The workplace walking challenge isn’t your annual performance plan, but a decent exercise in setting reasonable goals.
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- Staff Develops Healthy Habits
mistreatment The occurrence, as an example, it’s a walking challenge designed using the psychological “tricks” that the computer game trade uses to urge people to be inveterate (yes, diversion addiction is currently classified as a disorder by the globe Health Organization).
- Join Challenge Groups Online
Join the challenge group of members online to support and inspire you through this challenge. Share your development by publishing screenshots of your step-counting app, images of your fitness tracker, or views from your daily walk, or merely tell the group how the day went.
- Start Wherever You Are
If you currently use a pedometer or other step tracker, check the number of steps you’re currently taking on an average day. If you’re not tracking steps, use the first day of the challenge to get a concept of just how much you’re walking without actually pressing yourself. According to Mayo Clinic, most Americans walk 3,000 to 4,000 steps. You can jot down your steps so you can measure your progress throughout the month.
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- Get creative to walk more.
Focus on walking a bit more every day. Try to park farther away when you’re running errands, or swap your water bottle for a small glass, so you need to get up more often to refill it or. These and other imaginative ways to take more steps can assist you in reaching your daily objectives.
- Get a friend.
Stay responsible by teaming up with a strolling pal. An April 2017 research study in Nature Communications found that exercising was, essentially, contagious: People with physically active friends were more likely to be in shape and active themselves.
Think about recruiting a minimum of someone to join you for this challenge physically or virtually. Motivate them to join our Challenge Facebook Group so they can get in touch with our whole neighborhood.
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- Have Fun
No matter the background, walking could be a given for many people, and everyone enjoys having fun. Thus admixture of the 2 in an exceedingly team-based competition is sensible as a place to begin for common ground.
How to do a step challenge
It’s best to start a workplace step challenge with your staff with some explanation, just as you would a work-related project. Many folks don’t associate step challenges with health benefits. Confirm everybody who needs to participate is in a position to. This includes tracking with fitness apps.
- Anticipate Barriers
Walking 10,000 steps per day, and you’ll keep in excellent shape concept sounds easy. But many obstacles prevent people from doing just that – so it’s wise to plan ahead.
- Keep it Short
A thirty-day step challenge vs. 30 weeks challenge encourages participation. Most organizations see immediate success with short bursts of competition.
- Make it simple
Step challenges usually get complicated, with multiple variables together with steps, speed, and minutes. Adding multiple metrics not solely makes it exhausting to plan, execute, and manage a health challenge. However, it makes it more challenging for workers to ascertain who is winning. This may be a death knell for motivation and engagement.
- Creative Rewards
Imagine operating hard each day to produce 10,000 steps, hiking down the road within the rain rather than watching tv shows, and taking the steps instead of the elevator every day to win your company-wide movement challenge solely to search out that the prize is something lame, sort of a bottle or fanny pack.
- Encourage Team Concepts
Keeping staff-driven and engaged is the key to any movement challenge. Psychological studies tend to indicate that folks respond way more to external motivation than internal motivation. So if your step challenge consists entirely of people competing, participants are tasked with staying motivated and observing the leaderboard.
- Repeat
A company walking challenge could be an excellent way to jumpstart sensible habits organization-wide; however, you have to keep it going for meaningful enhancements in health to require root. Evoke feedback from your staff when your opening move challenge is complete.
Workplace Step Challenge Benefits
- It develops healthy competitors and is a terrific method to let your group walk towards a healthy mind and body.
- Step challenge is a simple and potent activity to inspire people into healthy lifestyle choices.
- It helps cause a healthy work culture at the workplace by assisting employees in leaving the inactive routine.
- It’s much easier to carry out, not requiring the infrastructure required to begin wellness programs.
- It is an easy program designed to satisfy all your health and wellness requirements in the most practical way.
Summary
With reaping the apparent health benefits, the step challenge brings employees along and helps build a healthy and fun work environment.
