NHS

What is active travel?

Active Travel is a funding and information program set up by the UK government to support expenditure on cycling and walking infrastructure. This funding is available for local authorities in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, as well as private businesses.

Learn more about Active Travel

Active Travel Step Challenges

Changing peoples habits on travel can be a long journey and one that should be approached from a variety of different angles. A great first step can be introducing a fun health initiative to try and reprogram how your participants think about their daily activity. Step challenges can be a great way of helping people think about increasing their daily step count by introducing the idea of personal goals and achievements. Combining this with materials to help your users ditch the solo car journeys for a walk to the nearest bus, or hopping on the bike for the daily commute, can be a great way to boost healthy living habits.

Accessibility and inclusion

At Big Team Challenge we take accessibility seriously and believe that exercise challenges should be as open and inclusive as possible to all users, regardless of their physical or mobility levels. To help make our steps challenges as inclusive as possible, we introduced our "activity conversion chart" to help users convert a variety of different physical activities into a comparable step count. These activities include yoga, aerobics, wheeling (wheelchair), pilates and much more.

Chat with one of our team members

Would you like to talk to one of our team members at Big Team Challenge about your own Active Travel initiative? Get in touch today

Creating motivation through friendly competition

After several years of data and hosting dozens of challenges for various councils, health boards, charities and private companies, we've come to learn a few things about building motivation.

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Teams Versus Teams

Big Team Challenge aside from being a simple step count challenge system, allows you to choose two forms of team building. The first–and arguably our most popular–is Teams Vs. Teams.
In this mode, all of your employees or participants get into teams ranging from 2 to 10 in members. Each team is then trying to complete the same virtual route as every other team in the challenge.
Teams are able to see other team's progress on the leaderboards, and can therefore build some friendly competition between each other.

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One Big Challenge

Our latest update is the new "One Big Challenge" mode. Much like Teams Vs Teams, everyone gets into a team of their own with their friends or family, and works together to increase their team's distance total. However the crucial difference here is that instead of each team working their solitary way across a virtual map, every team on the challenge contributes to pushing the whole challenge a long one single map. So while every team can still keep track of every other team and push motivation within their own, they are contributing to a firendlier version of the challenge where everyone is helping get the challenge completed.

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Giving out prizes

While everyone should be a winner simply for competing and engaging in some company fun, perhaps you want to hand out some prizes too to sweeten the pot.
We always discourage from giving a prize to the "number 1" on the leaderboard as it can be unfair on those that tried their very hardest but are perhaps older or have a reason they can't run 26 mile marathons every weekend.
This is why we built in detailed reporting so you can choose instead to reward anyone who perhaps added distance every day, or you could give prizes to three people at random who added 20000 steps over the course of a specific weekend.

We're walking to the moon and back again (and then there and back.... yet again).

We reached another exciting goal at Big Team Challenge this week: we reached over 7 billion steps walked together with all of our partners and their participants.

That means that we've collectively walked, cycled, ran, swam, rolled and jazzercised our way to the moon and back again... in fact we're on our return journey for the second time!

We would like to thank our clients for joining us and returning to us year after year and making this big milestone possible.

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An average step count of around 10,000 steps per participant

We always hear that number passed around a lot as a good target for everyone to achieve for their daily exercise goal. However, after pouring over our anonymised statistics, we actually found that our participants on average were exceeding this!

This is wonderful news for both us and our challenge organisers. It helps illustrate that Big Team Challenge can help build lasting change in participants, and even help maintain healthy attitudes to pushing yourself further.