4 Popular Fitness Challenges for Your Members

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popular fitness challenges

popular fitness challenges

Ever thought about hosting a fitness challenge to help your members achieve amazing results in a short amount of time? Sure, you could design and host your own fitness challenge, but this can be a very time-consuming process. Fortunately for you, these types of challenges are an extremely hot trend in the world of health and fitness right now. With hundreds of great challenges available on the web, why spend time creating your own? If you’re thinking about getting your members involved in a challenge, we recommend exploring the following options.

Whole Life Challenge

This challenge is built around helping participants form good habits in the following daily activities: nutrition, exercise, mobility, supplementation, hydration, lifestyle practice and reflection. This game-like challenge tracks body and fitness measurements over eight weeks, and requires participants to track points daily to engage in good habits. Eight weeks can be a long commitment, so if your gym has participated in this challenge before, consider getting members to participate again in the new, shorter Advanced Challenge.

Get your free copy of our guide, 7 Essential Strategies for Member Retention

EmFit Challenge

Have your members learn the basics of paleo, building muscle and living an all-around healthier lifestyle in this educational and effective 21-day challenge. Participants receive daily videos with tips and at-home, CrossFit®-inspired workouts to complete. Points are collected each day for completing certain tasks like working out, avoiding certain foods, taking fish oil and more. This challenge boasts a supportive community, and rewards those who receive a perfect score with superhero swag!

Lurong Living Challenge

Targeted specifically to CrossFit® boxes, this challenge combines diet, fitness and accountability to help athletes improve body composition and performance. Similar to the other challenges, athletes earn points for tracking their diet, performing various WODs, tracking personal goals and improving body measurements. To help entice individual athletes and affiliates to join the fun, awesome prizes are handed out, including Lurong paying for a box’s affiliation fees for one year!

Whole30

Perhaps you’re interested in developing a workout challenge, but don’t have the time to also develop a meal plan to go along with it. Consider complementing the your challenge with the Whole30. This food challenge encourages participants to eat natural, unprocessed foods and foods with few ingredients (all of which you should be able to pronounce), and promises life-changing results.

  • Details: Whole 30
  • Duration: 30 days
  • Cost: Free [clearfix]

While many of these challenges will have baseline workouts and measurements, we highly recommend that you set SMART goals with your members well before the challenge starts. Establish a solid “why” for your client. Ensure they understand the exact reason why they’re participating (rather than “just doing this to lose weight”), and have measurable goals they continue to work towards along the way that can be tracked in gym member software. This will help better set them up for success. It will also increase the likelihood that they’ll be satisfied with their progress and more likely to do another challenge at the gym in the future.


Fitness challenges are a great way to keep your members engaged with your community and motivated to continue working out. For more tips on how to keep your members loyal, get your free copy of our guide, 7 Essential Strategies for Member Retention!

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About the Author: Kelli Sweeting

I'm Coach Kelli, a devoted CrossFit gym owner with 15 years of experience managing my facility, along with owning yoga studios and wellness centers. Beyond the fitness world, I have a passion for cooking, cherish moments with my children and family, and find joy in spending time outside. Having experienced the highs and lows, I'm dedicated to leveraging my expertise to help you grow and succeed on your fitness journey.