Gym League Championships
Some of you may have noticed some of our gym members posting quite a lot lately tagging the gym and maybe mentioning something about a gym competition. Well I’d like to give everyone an explanation on what’s going on. At first, I didn’t really want to mention it publicly because I thought it was so genius I wanted to keep it to myself — but I’ll tell you because I love you.
Around this time last year, I had constantly been trying to think of some things to keep the gym members engaged and avoid a lull in our services as a business — especially as a gym because people don’t always see working out as “fun”. We started doing monthly competitions, gym member spotlights, etc. But it didn’t really get people excited like I was hoping.
Last year, I was working after our Saturday classes like I typically do and had a fantasy football draft coming up soon and started getting ready for that. As I was sitting at my desk with my RedBull with a few minutes to spare, my head started to wander. Then it just hit me…we should do a fantasy GYM league!
For those who don’t know what fantasy football is, let me explain. If you know what fantasy football is you can skip this paragraph. Fantasy football is where you have a group of friends who form a “league” and act as “managers” of a “team”. Each manager drafts NFL players to be on their team and those players score points each week based on how they perform. You go head to head with a different team each week and the team that scores more points that week wins that head-to-head match. At the end, you have a playoff based on who has the best records and so on.
One day, we coaches had a “draft”. We took turns selecting clients to be on our team. The teams were pretty much even. And the beauty of this is that you’re not necessarily going for who is the best athlete in your gym. I’ll explain the points system in a minute. So we had 3 teams where each team member could do something each day to score points that went to their team’s total points count. There were a ton of ways a person and team could score points. Here are all of the ways we did it.
Daily individual points:
Showing up to class (and doing the workout)
Posting on social media and tagging the gym
Writing a review on Facebook or Google
Hitting a PR
Referring a friend to the gym
Friend signing up
Learning a new skill
Etc…
Each action had a different amount of points. You can set that up however you want.
Monthly Team Challenges:
This was a three-and-a-half month competition (September 1st-December 15th)! So each month I posted a monthly challenge. These challenges were supposed to be like “extra credit” things. Ours were as follows:
September - Total meters rowed.
October - Total distance running/walking.
November - 100g of veggies with a meal (up to 3/day)
December (2 weeks) - Burpees
Each member would contribute to the challenge each day to accumulate points to their team’s monthly challenge total. At the end of each month, the points for the monthly challenge were tallied and the team that won got points added to their grand total.
Gameday Saturdays:
This is the only time where having the good athletes would come in handy. I would select one Saturday of each month (4 total) to actually score how people finished. I would score the top three males and top three females as follows:
1st place - 15 pts
2nd place - 10 pts
3rd place - 5 pts
Whoever scored on these workouts would have those points added to the team’s grand total.
This competition was a lot of fun! The only problem was it was a TON of work keeping track of the points. I used a Google Sheet to do it all. Now someone is going to build an app for it and make a ton of money…you’re welcome.
