Fitness Challenges with Friends

Friendly step or fitness challenges can be a fantastic way to keep each-other accountable and motivated! BUT, they're often demoralizing for some, and boring for others. Here's why:

The Strava Nightmare:

You head out for a long weekend walk, then all of a sudden, your friend uploads their 100-mile bike ride, whether you're competing on steps / distance / calories burned, the challenge is over before it's really begun. You can't win, and they don't need the motivation.

The Step-Challenge Disaster:

You setup a fun step challenge with some friends from work, to try and stay a bit more active. You go out for a walk at lunch time, quite happy with the 5k steps you've logged already, then Sarah from marketing (a not-so-secret marathon runner) logs in 25,000 steps by the end of Monday, and by Tuesday you're basically out of the running.

The Varied Friends Hypothesis:

The reality is, even if you friends all like to stay active, they often have quite different fitness levels, and engage in different types of exercise. A casual walker, a regular runner, a Crossfit enthusiast, and a yoga master... you're going to struggle to setup a fun and fair challenge you can all participate in together.

Here's the thing: Traditional fitness challenges only work if everyone's at the same fitness level, and doing similar sports / exercise. Spoiler alert: they rarely are, and it really limits who you can play with.

The result? The fit get fitter (and smugger), the beginners quit (and feel worse), and nobody has fun except that one overachiever who was going to exercise anyway.

Activity Points Goals

Motion uses a unique "activity points" system to set personalized goals for each user. This system crunches all your activity data into one simple numeric score, converting your steps, calories, mindful minutes, cycling distance, heart-rate etc. and translates them all into one score.

This means, no matter what sports or exercise you do, our score system will translate it into a "common currency", so you can compare and compete with friends doing completely different types of activity.

Effort-Based Goals

Everyone on Motion, gets a personal weekly goal, calibrated to their unique activity level, based on their own historic activity data. Then, any challenges are based on how well you each complete your own goal.

We call this "effort-based goals", because everyone is working at their own goal, at their own level, the winner is the person who puts in the most effort that week, not the person who logs the most activity.

Let's Break It Down

You, Mike, and Sarah from the office want to setup a challenge, and all sign up to Motion. Motion pulls in your historic activity data from your phone / smart watch / tracking apps, and calibrates all your goals:

Motion Calibrated Goals

Sarah (the not-so-secret marathon runner): Averages 20,000 steps / day normally
→ Motion goal: 2,000 activity points / week

You: Average 8,000 steps / day on a normal week
→ Motion goal: 800 activity points / week

Mike (office gym bro): Averages 5,000 steps / day + 4 strength training sessions
→ Motion goal: 1,300 activity points / week

Your challenge kicks off on Monday, and you all get at it to try and hit your goals... The week ends, and we have a look at the challenge results:

End-of-week results

Sarah: Tracked 126,000 steps this week (that's ~18,000 steps/day)
→ Motion goal: 1,800 / 2,000 activity points = ~90% goal

You: Push yourself and log 70,000 steps (10,000 steps/day)
→ Motion goal: 1,000 / 800 activity points = 125% goal

Mike: Manages 7,000 steps/day, but only 2 strength training sessions this week
→ Motion goal: 1,100 / 1,300 activity points = ~85% goal

The final result: You win the challenge!

Even though Sarah logged the most physical activity, that was actually less that she normally does, so was a low week for her, whereas you really pushed yourself and managed to do considerably more than you normally do, so your relative "effort" was higher, and you come out on top!.