Build it your way: A planner’s guide to the perfect fitness challenge

The secret to making a motivating, inclusive, and straight-forward fitness challenge is in the setup. When you have the right structure and ground rules, participants will know what counts, what doesn’t, and how to succeed.

In this blog post, you’ll find eight key steps to help you organize your thoughts, make important decisions, and create a challenge that fits your organization’s goals. We’ve provided a questionnaire at the end so you can create a clear picture of you ideal event and when you’re ready, we’ll help you bring it to life!

1. Decide what counts towards the leaderboard

One of the first questions participants ask is “What actually counts?”. Deciding this upfront and communicating it clearly with your participants is essential. Maybe you want to focus on steps only. Or maybe you want to make the challenge more holistic by adding bike rides, yoga, gym sessions, or even lifestyle habits to the mix.

What you decide to include in your challenge is intrinsically related to your goals. So whether it be a cumulative step challenge or an all-round wellbeing challenge, keep in mind what matters most to your goals: competition, inclusivity, or a balance of both.

Tip: Including a mix of workouts and habits makes the challenge more accessible for everyone.

2. Choose how to rank activities

Not all activities require the same amount of effort. An hour of running doesn’t feel the same as an hour of yoga. The former may feel more intense than the latter or vice versa depending on who you ask.

There are two ways to rank your activities:

• Rank them equally, where all movement counts the same
• Rank them by effort, where harder workouts score higher

Equal ranking encourages participants at all fitness levels to engage in the challenge, whereas effort-based ranking might discourage participants who prefer low-intensity activities. Both approaches work, but they are again reliant on the goal of the challenge.

Tip: Equal ranking keeps things inclusive, effort-based ranking makes it more competitive.

3. Set rules for data entry

How participants record their activity is just as important as the activity itself. Data recorded from your challenge can be set to automatically synced device data, but it can also include manual entries.

Choosing a sync-only approach may alienate participants who don’t have wearable tech or smartphones. It may also go against organization data privacy rules. Choosing manual entry, or a hybrid approach, offers more comprehensive and flexible data collection for your challenge.

4. Add daily caps

Keep the leaderboard balanced by setting a reasonable daily maximum (for example, 25,000 steps). This prevents extreme results from skewing the data and keeps things fair for everyone.

5. Define team structure

Step challenges don’t have to be individual competitions. Teams can bring energy, camaraderie, and accountability into the mix. Whether you want to form teams by department, region, or business unit, or mix things up by random assignment or self-selection, adding a team element to your challenge will definitely add to the experience.

With teams, you will also want to choose whether leaderboards reflect the total steps per team or the average per member. Total numbers can highlight large teams, while averages give smaller teams a fair chance. Think about what will drive the most engagement in your group.

6. Set goals and milestones

Having something to aim for beyond the leaderboard keeps participants motivated during a step challenge. You might set daily or weekly activity targets, include sub-challenges, or even map progress against a virtual map. Adding these keeps participants engaged and make the challenge feel like a shared experience

If you want to take a step (pun intended) towards a more fun and social challenge, consider celebrating milestones like activity streaks or sharing a selfie on the Event Feed. Little nudges like these help make your challenge a shared adventure.

7. Add Engagement with Videos and Social Features

There are two great ways to build ongoing engagement during your challenge:

• Workout videos: Integrate the on-demand Les Mills yoga, meditation, and workout videos to give participants easy ways to stay active and inspired.
• Social feed: Encourage participants to share their progress through photos, updates, or friendly messages on the event feed. This creates a sense of community and helps participants feel connected, even across departments or locations.

8. Plan how you’ll celebrate success

Finally, think about how you want to celebrate the results of your step challenge. Do you want to recognize top performers, those who showed up consistently, or those who improved the most? Maybe all three. How ever you choose to celebrate, define success clearly and make sure your participants know what they’re working towards.

Bottom Line

A well-designed step challenge does more than track movement. It creates purpose, fosters camaraderie, and inspires healthy habits that extend beyond the event itself. The eight steps above provide a clear framework for building fairness, clarity, and lasting engagement.

Once you’ve mapped out your ideas, we’ll help you turn them into action. From setup to launch, we’ll help you create and event that runs smoothly, engages everyone, and looks exactly like you envisioned it.

Start with structure, end with success. Design your challenge today.

Bonus Event Setup Questionnaire

Use this structured questionnaire to prepare for your perfect challenge.

Event Setup and Rules

1. Which of the following data would you like to include in your leaderboards? a. Background steps (e.g. walking to coffee machine or doing groceries) b. Walks and runs c. Bike rides d. Gym session e. Other activities (yoga, swimming, …) f. Incorporating healthy habits such as staying hydrated or eating a healthy meal).
2. When you have someone doing 1 hour of running and someone else doing 1 hour of yoga, how would you like to rank those activities? a. Equally (both participants did a 1-hour workout) b. Running first (more steps/effort than yoga)
3. Do you want to allow manual entry? Or should everyone have a device or use their phone a. Even when manual entry is not allowed, administrators can either make one-time exceptions or allow certain users to still be able to do manual entries.
4. Would you like to set a daily cap? E.g. no more than 25k or 40k steps per day?
5. Do you have any specific other rules in mind? Teams
6. Do you want to include some sort of team components? a. Country vs country or BU vs BU? b. Self-managed teams? c. Randomly assigned teams? d. Admin-assigned teams?
7. If you want a team component, would you want the leaderboards to be based on total by team, or average by team member? Sub-challenges and leaderboards
8. Would you like to set a specific goal for each leaderboard? Or keep them open ended?
9. Would you like to include a daily or weekly target? a. Benefit is to focus more on consistency rather than competitiveness
10. Would you like to set intermediate goals or milestones? a. Should these milestones be based on individual progress, team progress, or the collective progress?
11. Would you want to add sub-challenges? E.g. leaderboards per week or per month?
12. Would you like to add a journey to a challenge? a. If so, would you want to use on our ready-to-go journeys, or create a journey unique for your organization?
13. Would you like to add special bonus badges for sharing selfies or stories on the feed?
14. Do you want to assign participants to specific leaderboards (e.g., based on geography or type of challenge) or all participants eligible for all leaderboards. Reporting
15. Are there any specific reports you’d like to generate?
16. Based on which criteria are you going to select the winners of the event?
17. How many days after the end of the event would you like to announce the winners?