Who doesn’t love a challenge?!

Challenges have been really helpful in not only growing my business, but keeping my personal training clients and studio members motivated! Best of all, challenges tend to lead to better results for them too—which keeps them happy, and improves retention.

Why run an exercise challenge?

1. Results

Trainers, we’re in this business to get our clients results! That’s the whole point of our profession—to help people feel they’re best and healthiest.

2. Referrals

When your clients feel better and really get results—they tell all of their friends! Word of mouth marketing will be huge for your business!

3. Motivation

Challenges are also really great for adding the competition factor and increasing client engagement! I have found it just adds a little extra motivation to clients—especially when there are good prizes! LOL. 🤪

How do you run an exercise challenge?

There are so many different ways! You can offer challenges with different time frames and different focus options. They can be flexible or strict. They can be free or paid.

Read The Ultimate Guide to Running a Fitness Challenge to learn more about how to set one up!

You can decide how to customize them for your business! Think about your end goal—growth, client engagement, sales, results—and then build a challenge that supports that goal!

Regardless, these exercise challenge ideas can be customized to suit your business!

10 Exercise Challenges to Try in Your Business

I’m going to share 10 exercise challenge ideas you can implement in your business to help motivate your clients (and hopefully grow your business).

Exercise Challenge Idea #1

30 Day Movement Challenge – Challenge your clients to hit 10K steps minimum per day for 30 days straight. You can have clients sync their apple watches and FitBits to your Trainerize App and put all members into a group within the app to motivate each other to get their steps.

Exercise Challenge Idea #2

14 Day Track What They Eat Challenge – Have clients track and hit a daily nutrition goal for 14 days straight.

Exercise Challenge Idea #3

90 Day Fat Loss Challenge – Provide clients with nutrition coaching and workouts for 90 days through your Trainerize app. This would obviously be a paid challenge that you could market prior to the start to hopefully get new clients into your app. Have clients take progress pics and measurements and track all workouts in the app.

Exercise Challenge Idea #4

30 Day Healthy Habits Challenge – Help clients build healthy habits by using the habits coaching feature in the app, schedule them all into the calendar with a few different focuses each week and complete.

Exercise Challenge Idea #5

8 Week Strength Training Challenge – This could be a pre-made strength training program (for the gym or home) teaching clients about progressive overload and how to stick to a strength training program. You could also sell this as an 8 week challenge in order to bring more clients into your app who want to learn how to strength train.

Exercise Challenge Idea #6

4 Week Push Up Challenge – have clients perform a specific number of push ups each day with a focus on form and getting stronger.

Exercise Challenge Idea #7

4 Week Personal Best Challenge – Have clients decide at the beginning of the challenge something they want to really focus on and be better at. This could be meal prepping, drinking water, number of workouts each week, number or reps or weight lifted in an exercise, number of steps each day or week? his will help motivate clients and improve their results.

Exercise Challenge Idea #8

Step Count Challenge – Challenge clients to increase their step count each day/week. Depending on how many steps they get each day on a regular basis, challenge them to get more and make a point to move more during their day.

Exercise Challenge Idea #9

30 Day Weight Loss Challenge – Create workouts and nutrition guidelines to challenge people to focus on themselves and weight loss for 30 days. Add all the challengers to a group in Trainerize so they can help motivate each other and help coach them through the 30 days by teaching healthy habits, movement, and techniques they can continue on after the 30 day challenge is over.

Exercise Challenge Idea #10

4 Week Daily Movement Challenge – Coach clients and create a workout schedule they can follow that includes strength training and movement each day. This will help show people how they add movement into their day around their workouts and hold them accountable for daily movement for at least 4 weeks.

There are so many great exercise challenge ideas—and definitely more than I’ve shared here! Reach current and future clients, boost motivation and results, and ultimately, increase business! All you have to do is get creative and test a few out to see what really excites people and works for your niche and clientele.

What are your favorite exercise challenge ideas? Share to us on Instagram—@trainerize!