Even better, you’ll create serious family bonding, accountability, and memories, while providing an opportunity to build positive change for everyone in your household.
Why Your Family Should Try a Fitness Challenge
There are many reasons to start a family fitness challenge and even more fitness goals to pursue. Some families seek to do a fitness challenge together for the sheer fun of it or out of competitiveness. Possible goals might be to work up to running a set distance at a set pace or to prepare for a fitness-related trip or event. Other families may want to address a specific health or fitness concern, such as eating habits, screen time, inactivity, or weight loss. Some families want to jumpstart their athletic selves and/or simply to build healthier lifestyles. Others hope to boost family connection, physical activity, and screen-free interaction. Below, we outline how to select and organize a fitness challenge, and offer tips for making it work for your family. There are limitless options for great goals to pursue. Check out our list of challenge ideas to help you discover the one that’s just right for your family—or use our suggestions as a starting point to create one of your own.
Choose Your Challenge
First off, narrow in on what you are hoping to achieve for your family. Then, come up with a few fitness challenge ideas that sync up with those goals. Finally, hold a family meeting to brainstorm together, solidify your specific plan, and kick off your challenge. At your meeting, start by presenting your ideas and explaining what you are hoping to achieve—from boosting physical activity to cutting back on cell phone use. Solicit everyone’s ideas, including little kids, too. Select a final challenge that appeals to everyone (at least as many people as you can) and is doable.
Pick Your Goal
Some families will have a particular area of fitness they want to work on, but your challenge could be about any factor of healthy living such as diet, mental health, and/or screen time. Take a look at the below list of possible goals to help you find your family’s optimal challenge.
Healthy Eating
Your family might decide to target healthy eating. This could include cutting back on processed foods, carbs, snacking, meat, fast food, or eating out. Your challenge could be related to cooking as a family, trying one new recipe nightly for a month, or having each person take on meal planning and preparation one night per week. You could challenge each other to eat more adventurously or smaller portions. Your family might have health issues to confront, such as food allergies, gluten intolerance, obesity, and/or other health concerns, and want to institute diet changes for the whole family. Alternatively, your family might seek to try out vegetarianism, the Mediterranean Diet, or some other big change in the way your household eats.
Physical Activity
There are no limits to the physical fitness challenges your family could pursue. You might generally seek to increase physical activity or you might have a specific end in mind, such as running, biking, or hiking together. You might want to work on new strength or flexibility goals, such as measuring your splits over the course of a challenge or moving from doing 10 pushups a day to 30. Your family could decide to work toward a particular event, such as picking a 5K run you’ll do together. You might aim to go on a family walk every night after dinner for a month, adding on an extra block or two each night. You could decide to explore your local area by doing a different hike every weekend for a year or challenge each other to learn a new sport, such as hockey or racketball that you’ll play together. You might schedule weekly field games or obstacle courses. Alternatively, each family member could choose a personal fitness goal to tackle—doing it together can help keep you each motivated and accountable.
Wellness
Like many of us, is your family under a lot of stress and/or missing family or recreation time? If so, you could make a fitness challenge to address wellness, relaxation, and mental health needs. Schedule mindfulness activities, such as weekly family yoga, dance parties, game nights, aromatherapy, meditation sessions, or other activities. You could decide to form a family book club or challenge each other to read, write, draw, or paint for pleasure for 30 minutes a day. Join a pottery class together. Make Sunday evenings a family journaling session or a time to create to-do lists together to improve productivity and time management skills. Expose each other to new music by switching off playing DJ once a week. Learn to tell jokes. You could tackle the clutter in your home (a sure way to alleviate stress) by working together on one room of the house each week. Or you could have each person take on one drawer, closet, box, cabinet, or pile each day until your house is organized. Then, donate and/or sell any items you don’t want—and use any proceeds to buy something that everyone can enjoy, such as a basketball hoop or board games.
Screen Time
Another option to consider for your family fitness challenge is to combat excess electronics usage—something most families struggle with. Talk about what you hope to change about how your family interacts with electronic devices. You might challenge each other to delete certain apps, limit social media usage, set specific phone-free hours or rules, or simply reduce your daily hours in front of screens. Finding ways to make your challenge competitive (such as who can cut their usage by 50% or hold off on checking their phone for the longest stretch) and coming up with alternative activities (such as rollerblading or making cookies) to replace screen time will make your quest to change your screen habits more fun.
Make a Plan
Once you’ve selected your family fitness challenge, tailor your goal to your family’s needs and think through all the details. Ultimately, you want to create an actionable plan to follow throughout the process. The more specific you can get about how your family fitness challenge will work, what your goals are, and any pertinent rules you will follow, the better. That said, it’s important to weave in some flexibility—and fun—as well.
Specify Your Goal
Be sure to spell out exactly what you’re hoping to achieve and what you’ll need to do to get there. Break it down as concretely as possible with a schedule for reviewing your progress so that you can keep track of how things are going. For example, if you choose healthy eating, what does that mean? Maybe you’ll cut back on fast food, add more vegetables to your daily menu, pack nutritious lunches for school and work, and/or drink more water. You might decide to keep a food log and/or add new elements to your challenge each week, such as progressively dropping (or adding) certain foods or eating habits from your diet.
Track Your Progress
Decide exactly how will you track your family’s progress during your fitness challenge. Plan whether you’ll log minutes of exercise, steps taken (use a pedometer or other activity monitoring app), pounds or inches lost, new foods tried, personal best records, yoga poses mastered, and so on. Use whatever method works for best your family’s particular wellness goal. Keep in mind that not only are you promoting healthy choices with your fitness challenge, but you are teaching your children critical life skills, including goal-setting, time management, responsibility, self-motivation, and the value of hard work. Be sure to monitor, discuss, and praise those efforts as well as any tangible fitness successes.
Cultivate Buy-In
Come up with ways to maintain motivation that will inspire your family. Pep talks, star charts, journaling, weekly check-ins, making your challenge competitive (but not overly so), and dividing into buddies are all methods that can help keep you all on track. Think about how you’ll celebrate your achievements, too. Pick whatever methods of inspiration make sense for your family. Posting a visual reminder of what you’re working on and how far you’ve come in a prominent place is usually effective, as is setting a regular interval for check-ins to record your progress and troubleshoot any problems. Be open to adjusting goals as needed. Maybe you’ll log your daily steps each night at bedtime, or have meetings on Sundays where each family member can share the progress they’ve made toward your group goal. Take this opportunity to cheer each other on. Celebrate victories as well as brainstorm solutions to any roadblocks that may occur.
Choose a Reward
As your family strives to complete your fitness challenge, consider coming up with an enticing reward. Beyond just the pleasure of sticking with and completing your goal, having a tangible prize can help motivate your crew to keep going—so can the promise of an exciting experience. Rewards can be a group gift that you can enjoy together, individual prizes, or something different for each person in your family. Decide as a family what you want to work towards. But if you know your kids will likely ask for the moon, it can help for the adults in the household to come up with reasonable options to choose from. Almost anything goes, such as cold, hard cash, a new toy, a special outing, a celebratory meal, or any other way your family decides to bask in your success. Best of all, choose a whole-family reward that reinforces your healthy lifestyle goal. That could mean a family pool pass, an outdoor toy (such as a trampoline or soccer nets) you can all share, or a picnic at the best playground around.
A Word From Verywell
After you’ve tasted success, don’t rest on your laurels. Keep the momentum going by starting again with a brand-new objective. If your first challenge prompted you to change your exercise habits, maybe your second one can tackle a healthy eating habit or focus on screen time. Alternatively, stick with your original plan, but set the bar higher. If you successfully reduced your family screen time by a few hours a week, you could continue cutting back. Or if you completed a 5K, sign up for another one. Maybe you’d like to finish faster, but that’s not necessary. Simply maintaining your new fitness habit is much more important—and rewarding.
