Healthy Living Blog

May is National Walking Month

We're ramping up to May 2025, when we will see the UK launch it's annual National Walking Month! That means shaking off our winter routines and embracing the new spring weather. Read more about National Walking Month‍

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The benefits of walking

We've covered this topic a lot in previous posts, but what it boils down to is that moving keeps both our bodies active, but also our minds! Research has proven time and time again that simply going for a leisurely walk each day can help with chronic mental health issues, such as anxiety and stress, and even help with sleep patterns.

Walking is a low impact activity that is accessible to so many people, and it is one that should be promoted as often as possible. A great way to help change people's perception of it and to help build a routine is to run a walking challenge with us!

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Step Challenges

One of the easiest ways to get everyone involved this year is to run a walking challenge for your family, friends and community. Walking has so many wonderful health and mental wellbeing benefits, and is one of the easiest forms of exercise to get started with.

Creating your own challenge takes minutes with Big Team Challenge's 'Challenge Creator'. This allows you to choose how many participants can join, how long the challenge lasts for, what route you can walk and much more.

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Our New Virtual Walks

To celebrate the UK and National Walking Month, we have created 4 new routes, each specifically around ones of the 4 countries.

Walk Northern Ireland

Walk Scotland

Walk England

Walk Wales

While there's no time like the present, sometimes we need a little bit of time to plan important things such as step challenges!

With 2025 just around the corner, now would be a great time to start considering running a challenge for your workforce to help the get happy, healthy and motivated in the new year.

Step challenges and their affect on wellbeing

Step challenges are a great way to shake off the winter blues and get everyone thinking about their daily activity levels. A simple walk each day can help boost not only physical wellbeing, but mental wellbeing too. Not to mention it's a great way to help people stay motivated and focused at work.

At Big Team Challenge we must be doing a lot of walking, as our productivity has been through the roof this year, with a whole host of improvements and features being worked on behind the scenes. This year we introduced our built-in activity conversion feature, as well as team chat and a whole host of behind the scenes upgrades!

Get some ideas for your January step challenge

Keep your teams motivated with chat!

We recently launched our newest feature; Team Chat to help users keep connected with their team mates.
This latest updates allows team members to chat within their own team to help keep each other motivated, inspired and talking about their daily activity.

This was one of our most requested features so we're really excited to see it roll out to our platform.

Making it easier to track your daily activities

While something as simple as walking can have huge benefits to your physical and mental wellbeing, it's not the only option for people wanting to stay active. It's not even the easiest!

We've now built our activity conversion chart right into our apps and website, allowing users to convert over 100 activities, such as Yoga, Gardenning, Basketball, Cycling and Aerobics into a comparible step count.

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Greater levels of participation

Creating a walking or running challenge is simple, easy, and to the point. You can create it and ask all of your participants to get up, move about during lunch, and track those steps along a virtual map. It's a fun and intuitive way to get people motivated, but what about those who have a lower activity level or mobility issues? The message of getting up and moving about might be daunting to them or physically unachieveable.

This is where we saw the benefits of the conversion chart and why we chose to develop this new feature. Not only does it open up a world of other activities to every user, but it brings the opportunity for those in wheelchairs, walking aids, or with mobility issues to do other activities and participate with the rest of their team.

So why not encourage some gardening at the weekends, some yoga at lunch, or some swimming in the morning?

Read our full help article here to learn exactly how the activity conversion feature works.

Getting healthy and motivated in 2024

2024 has begun and what better time to think about chnaging your daily habits for the rest of the year.

January can be a daunting period of time for everyone; with thoughts about jobs, family, healthy living, and how to shake off the winter blues occupying a lot of our brain power. A great way to help all of your employees find their focus and get motivated for the year ahead is to run an inclusive health and wellbeing initiative such as a corporate step challenge.

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The benefits of a winter step challenge

The darker nights and the colder days can be a real turn-off for a lot of people during the long winter months, which is why engaging in group activities can be a real benefit to your workforce. Encouraging a little firendly competition with team and individual leaderboards, activity-based achievements, and virtual maps can be a great way to motivate your employees to get moving when they otherwise might not. Team challenges are not only a great way to help get everyone active and moving, but can be a fantastic team building opportunity too, with users encouraging each other and building up lines of communication that might not have existed before.

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Creating your own step challenge

Creating your very own step challenge takes only a couple of minutes using our Set Up Wizard. Simply sign up for a free admin account at https://app.bigteamchallenge.com/signup-form and begin using our challenge creator to customise your challenge to your needs, find a virtual route that suits you, and publish whenever you are ready. You'll only ever be asked to pay when you are ready to launch your challenge, so play around and explore the options that we've built into our system.

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Looking to chat with someone?

We underdstand that it can be a little daunting to run a step challenge for the first time, which is why we offer a free call to go over the systems features and discuss your ideas. Drop us a mnessage today to book your call and learn more about our step challenge software.