Fitness Challenge Blog

Becoming a Wellness Games Maker

Allow employees to participate in your own fitness games

June 13, 2021 by Joseph

It’s that time again… When both sports fans and those who usually don’t care spend their time discussing international competition. With interest at its peak, what better time to host games of your own! The ChallengeRunner platform has the unique ability to run not only the standard challenge where everyone competes against everyone else on a leaderboard, but also a tournament-style competition where participants compete one-on-one until a winner can be declared. In essence, the perfect system to improve your user health, promote teamwork, have fun, and run your own games!

Tournaments can operate using individual participants, teams, or a combination of both. Since this is designed to be an international competition, teams are recommended with names representing the various locations, nationalities, or heritage of participants such as: England, Mexico, Canada, US, etc. Another recommendation would be to use team averaging so that smaller teams can effectively compete against larger teams. Teams can be created in many ways, but the simplest method is for the admin to create the teams before inviting participants to join and allowing participants to select a team when they register. If you would like to distribute participants more evenly across the teams, you can choose to limit the number of participants in each team.

Next, you would want to decide the activities your participants will be competing over. You can use a simple “steps walked” or “active minutes” activity or a combination of multiple activities such as sleep, nutrition, and meditation. The choice is up to you and activities should be selected to promote the goals of your organization’s wellness program. Whatever activities you choose, you will also need to decide on how long each “round” of your tournament will last.

Unlike a typical challenge where you set the start and end dates and participants compete against each other from the start to the finish, a tournament is broken into several rounds depending on the number of participants and the selected number of available seeds. In the first “seed” round, participants compete against each other in order to be selected into the tournament. When you create the tournament in ChallengeRunner and set your activity start and end dates, you are, in effect, setting the start and end dates for the seed round. Once the seed round completes, the first tournament round is automatically created by the system where it places the highest performer with the lowest, the second highest with the second lowest, etc. until all participants have a one-on-one challenge. This automatically created round will be the same duration as the seed round so, if the seed round was one week long, the first round of the tournament will also be one week long. When the first round completes, the winners of the one-on-one challenges advance to compete against other winners. This process continues until there are only two participants or teams left. The tournament champion can then be declared at the end of the final round.

Tournament Setup

Like all aspects of the ChallengeRunner system, setting up a tournament is quick and easy. You can choose to create a completely custom challenge with any activities you like, or you can select the Create a Walking Tournament quick start option. If you choose to build a custom tournament, you can use the following guide to get started creating a challenge and then convert it to a tournament with the following:

1. Click the Edit Challenge button next to the challenge name
2. On the Elimination Tournament row, select option Single Elimination
3. Enter the race name and click Next
4. Select the maximum number of Seeds in the first round. If you would like to allow the highest number possible, select 64 and the system will adjust automatically if there are fewer than 64 participants or teams registered

Throughout the tournament, an additional leaderboard is available showing the brackets and point totals of the competitors. If the external leaderboard is enabled, it will show the brackets instead of a bar chart. The external leaderboard is mainly used to show tournament progress to non-participants.

In the end, your wellness challenge takes on new life in a fun and exciting way. Just like other tournaments, the strongest team does not always win. It all comes down to individual matchups and whomever is better each round. Use the tournament process to increase participation in your wellness activities, promote a healthy lifestyle and diversity, and make good use of international competition!

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