Healthy Living Blog

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

Running A Step Challenge

A step challenge is an online exercise initiative run by a company or organisation that encourages participants to get active in their daily lives. Users connect their smart phones or wearable devices to the challenge app and track their daily step counts against a virtual map around the world; the more the users walk, the more they explore!

Challenges can vary in how they are set up, with some pushing for individuals to participate by themselves and others encouraging teams to combine their effort and keep each other motivated.

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Creating your own step challenge

Below we will go over some of the steps you need to consider before creating your first step challenge.

‍Individuals or team challenges?

Are you looking to create an exercise challenge that is focused on an individual trying to complete the challenge, or are you looking to motivate a group of users to work together? Both options have their merits, however the team option can have added benefits of allowing for friendly competition and team building.
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Big Team Challenge also has two modes of competition, Teams vs Teams and One Big Challenge. You can read more about these challenge modes or get in touch to learn more.

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Choosing a virtual route

It's always fun to choose an exciting idea such as "walk around the world" or "walk to the moon and back", but these goals can often be overwhelming for users.
You should first consider how many users are on each team and what distance each user can comfortably be expected to do each day.

As a simple estimate you can use the following calculation:

Number of users per team x Number of days the challenge lasts x daily step goal = Route length

For example - 5 people per team, over 42 days, each trying to do 7500 steps a day = 1086km (each step is 0.69m)

Big Team Challenge has over 250 virtual routes to choose from, so there's something in there for everyone, regardless of their fitness levels.

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Get the word out there

Before you can get walking around the countryside of France, or island hopping around the Caribbean, you first have to let everyone know the challenge is even happening.

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Communication with your audience is key part to the success of any step challenge. You will find that your level of involvement directly relates to how much engagement you can expect from your challenge participants.

Some ideas to keep users engaged:

• Weekly or twice weekly email updates to let everyone know of the challenge progress.

• Encourage users to post their progress or achievements on social media using your challenge hashtag

• Run friendly competitions

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Big Team Challenge offers challenge organisers their own admin area, where they can create their challenge, launch a user registration page and even keep in communication with all of the users.

To learn more about our system, watch the video below or get in touch for a personalised demo.

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Finding the perfect name for your team can be tricky. Do you go for a pun, some awesome alliteration or a statement of your gonna-win attitude? We've compiled a list of 50+ team name ideas to give you some inspiration.

Love a Good Pun?

• Legs Miserable
• Red Hot Chilli Steppers
• Scrambled Legs
• Jabberwalkers
• Johnnie Walkers
• Rise of SkyWalkers
• The Walk 'Em Dead
• All About That Pace
• Walking 9 to 5
• Chafing The Dream
• Sole Sisters
• Adventure Afoot
• Mission Slimpossible
• Slow Patrol
• Agony of De Feet
• Cirque de Sore Legs
• Ketchup If You Can
• Lost in Pace
• Pimp My Stride
• School of Walk
• Holy Walkamolie!
• Walk 'n Roll! (or Walk n' Sole!)
• Gloves Actually (for a Winter challenge)

Climb (the Leaderboard) With a Rhyme

• Blister Sisters
• Quad Squad
• Senior Steppers

Talking the Challenge Seriously?

• Miles Over Matter
• Team Smash It!
• The A Team
• Walk the Talk
• Walking Divas
• Super Sprinters
• Catch Us If You Can
• Road Runners
• In It To Win It!
• Achilles Heels
• The Pacemakers

Just Looking to Feel Healthy and Have Some Fun?

• Are We There Yet?
• Walk This Way
• One Step Ahead
• The Globe Trotters
• The Walkie Talkies
• You'll Never Walk Alone
• Step By Step
• A Step Ahead
• These Boots Were Made for Walking
• The Dream Team
• Take A Hike
• Happy Feet
• One Step at a Time
• Paw Patrol (for dog walkers!)
• Steptacular
• The Walkaholics
• Happy Feet
• Take a Hike

Finding a unique name for your team is a fun way to start your challenge. Talk to your teammates to get more ideas then once you're done, either create your team or change the name of your existing team.

Staying motivated with a team behind you

Regular exercise can be a great way of staying healthy both physically and mentally, but it can be hard to stay motivated when it's just you. Shorter days, work deadlines and bad weather can all contribute to making you want to stay indoors and simply unwind while watching TV under a blanket, however this can actually lead to feeling worse in the long run. Regular daily exercise is an important part of any self care routine and has been shown time and time again to have an impact on your mental health.

Joining or creating groups with like-minded people can be a great way of motivating each other and encouraging more mindful thinking towards exercise.

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Creating a virtual walking challenge can help make a lasting change

Virtual walking challenges are a great way to begin this process. Participants are encouraged to sign up, create or join an existing team and start tracking their daily step counts. Being a part of a team helps create some friendly motivation, with users encouraged to keep up with their fellow team mates. With the use of team activity, unlock-able achievements and virtual routes they can track their progress along, a walking challenge can be a great way to boost motivation and help change long term attitudes towards exercise.

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Teams leaderboard

The addition of a challenge-wide leaderboard can help extend this competitive element to the wider community, with each team being able to actively compete against others on the challenge.

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Available worldwide

Another benefit of a virtual challenge is that it isn't limited to your local community, it's open to a worldwide audience. Creating a challenge across the globe can be a great way of users connecting with family, friends or colleagues from different countries.

Why not start your own Virtual Walk today?

Learn how to create your own Virtual Walking Challenge on Big team Challenge

A happy and motivated workforce

At Big Team Challenge, our main goal has always been to get staff moving and motivated. It's a simple goal that's easy to achieve and one that's easy to get most of management to agree upon.
From this simple concept, we've built our walking challenge apps to be as fun, intuitive and inclusive as we possibly can.

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Create your own team walking challenge!

You can have your very own walking challenge up and running in a matter of minutes. Simply signup using our online form and get instant access to your very own admin area. From here you can use our challenge creator to set up your challenge, choose your route and pay instantly.

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Virtual walking routes

Our library contains over 220 virtual walking routes, which are free to use on your paid challenge. Alternatively you can get in touch with us directly and we'd be happy to discuss creating a custom walking route for your corporate walking challenge.

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Download our walking challenge app

Big team challenge is not only available online via our web service, but also through our very own iPhone and Android apps, which users can download for free.

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Find more information about our Walking Challenges