A 30 day cardio challenge re-engages current clients and can also convert leads into paying clients. A cardio workout is important for any type of fitness goal, whether it be fat loss, strength, functional fitness, or general health improvements. Further, a 30 day time period is an ideal length of time for a workout challenge. It’s just long enough to see results, but not so long that people feel it’s a big commitment. Setting up a 30 day challenge takes only five steps.
- Determine your audience
- Pick a venue
- Choose a goal, focus, or theme
- Create a space to connect
- Market the workout challenge
From there, it’s plug and play to host a fitness challenge, motivate clients, inspire results, and get new clients.
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1. Determine Your Audience
There are many types of fitness clients. Even though they have different foals, you’ll want to consider a few things about the types of participants you’re trying to attract. This includes considering their starting fitness level. Simplify this process by categorizing who the majority of the audience will be. When it comes to exercise, are they beginners, recreational and moderate gym goers, or advanced clients. This will help you scale the intensity of the challenge and structure other elements around it, like ensuring they have rest days and other injury prevention protocols.
Additionally, you should decide what your ultimate goal is. For example:
- Are you looking to boost revenue with existing fitness clients?
- Are you trying to grow your clientele base with new customers?
- Are you trying to offer more value to current packages?
- Are you trying to increase your fitness brand awareness?
This will help you determine pricing (if there’s a cost) and a marketing strategy to promote your challenge and achieve your fitness business goals.
2. Pick a Venue
If you’re focusing only on current fitness clients, you may be able to host the challenge both in-person and virtually. If you hope to attract a large audience of new potential clients, virtual might be the best option–especially because you can cast your net more broadly. Running a 30 day workout challenge online is easier than you might think.
When choosing your venue, consider the many options available to you:
- Zoom
- In-person
- Blend of the two
- IG or Facebook community
If offering it virtually, you’ll also need to decide whether the videos will be hosted or live or on-demand. If your audience and primary objective is to attract and convert prospects into leads, consider making the cardio challenge doable with an at home workout. This means your exercise selection should be primarily body weight exercises that most people can do. Below is a list of popular cardio exercises most people can do at home:
- Mountain climber
- Walking lunge
- High knees
- Jump rope (or imaginary rope)
- Knee ups
- Jumping jacks
- Forearm plank
- Squat
You may notice, some of these exercises–like the squat, lunge, plank, and pushup–are traditionally strength training exercises. However, cardio training includes any form of exercise that elevates the heart rate, and therefore these too can be included. Additionally, these exercises are basic and most people know them.
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3. Choose the Focus or Theme
The fun thing about hosting a cardio challenge is that you can take it in many different directions. If you love Zumba, you can offer a Zumba-themed cardio challenge. If HIIT is your specialty, design a challenge around the principles of intensity interval training.
When choosing your focus, go back to your audience. If you’re marketing to current clients, it may be wise to focus on a type of cardio training you know they like most. If trying to reach new clients, you can reach more clients by focusing on a general theme with multiple modalities built-in. For example, a 30 Day Summer Prep Cardio Challenge might include some HIIT, Zumba, and functional fitness.
4. Create a Space to Connect
Offer a space for challenge participants to connect. This will make them more successful because studies suggest that social support is key to any weight loss program. While your program may not be focused on weight loss, providing support through a community can help clients stay on track, engaged, and connected from start to finish.
Use the group to share:
- Motivating messages
- Healthy eating tips
- Recipe ideas
- Exercise modifications
- Live Q&A opportunities
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5. Market Your Program
No matter how great your cardio challenge is—without marketing, you’ll struggle to see success. If your challenge will be a paid add-on for current clients, you’ll likely be reaching out to them personally to invite them. If you’re offering it free to your community, your marketing will need to be broader and likely include social media marketing, email marketing, and even some direct outreach.
Use the following tips to recruit participants and make your cardio challenge stand-out:
Share your story
Don’t just promote this as another cardio challenge. Share about why it’s important to you or how cardio played a role in your fitness journey. Set yourself apart by leaning on the most unique part about you: your personal story.
Use the right hashtags
If you’re promoting your challenge on Instagram, the right hashtags will help you reach more people. Leave out hashtags like #MondayMotivation that have millions of posts—you’ll just get lost in the noise. Instead, use the ones that have 500k or fewer posts, like these fitness hashtags.
Start early
Give yourself time to reach a lot of people, offer early bird pricing, and tease the last few days of being able to join. Leveraging urgency is one of your best marketing tools and with a proper amount of time, you can do that multiple times throughout the marketing period.
Hosting a fitness challenge is just one of the many things you can do as a personal trainer to attract and retain more clients. In fact, it’s part of fitness business and entrepreneurship, courses exercise science students take at Lionel University learn all about in their degree programs.
When you get a degree in exercise science from Lionel University, you learn it all. And, if you love fitness, learning is easy. What’s even better is that you can work in the fitness industry while you complete your degree! Within the first few months of your Lionel degree program, you’ll earn your personal training certification and your Master Trainer Certificate (making you more employable and at a higher rate). It allows you to learn more about what you want to specialize in as you go through your training and the type of exercise science job you want long term.
And, with the help of financial aid, earning your exercise science degree is even more of a possibility. Check out our programs and contact Lionel today!
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