Healthy Living Blog

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.

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We now connect with Samsung Health

With the release of our latest app update we now connect with Samsung Health and many more devices and services than ever before.

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How to connect Samsung Health to the step challenge

Connecting Health Connect on Android to Big Team Challenge allows you to sync your steps from the following platforms:

• Google Fit
• Samsung Health
• MyFitnessPal
• And others as more providers join the Health Connect platform

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Connecting Samsung Health or Google Fit to Big Team Challenge is a two-stage process:

1. Connect Samsung Health/Google Fit to Health Connect
2. Connect Health Connect to Big Team Challenge

Step One

Download Health Connect from Google Play here.

Open the Health Connect app and tap Get Started.

Select App permissions. You should see Samsung Health or Fit. If not, tap "Can't see all your apps?" at the bottom of the list, then "See all compatible apps" on the next screen. You should be able to select Samsung Health or Google Fit.

Now, select Samsung Health or Fit from the list (as per the screenshot above).

On the next screen, tap "Allow all" or select at least "Steps". You are finished connecting Samsung Health/Google Fit to Health Connect. Move on to Step Two.

Steps Two

Now you need to connect Big Team Challenge to Health Connection.

Open the Big Team Challenge app and go to Sync Device in the menu.

You should see "Health Connect" at the top of the list, Tap on "Connect", and then "Connect" again on the popup that appears.

Finally, you need to give Big Team Challenge permission to access Health Connect. Enable "Allow all" at the top of the list, then "Allow" at the bottom.

You should now be connected to Health Connect.

If you run into any errors, please take a note/screenshot of the message and contact our support team for more assistance.

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