Designing a challenge for people who do not exercise yet
How to design a challenge for the majority who are not yet regularly active: start at a very low level, measure active days rather than total minutes, and drop every individual ranking element.
Most workplace activity challenges are designed by people who already train regularly, for groups of people who already train regularly. Everyone else — usually the majority — signs up, tries it for a week, and stops. This article describes how to design in the opposite direction.
Principle 1: Count active days, not total minutes
For a newcomer, the important question is not “how many minutes did you train this week” but “on how many days this week did you move”.
- Total minutes: rewards people who cram everything into the weekend; someone walking 10 minutes a day reaches 70 minutes and finds themselves losing to someone who runs for 90 minutes in one session.
- Active days: any day with 10 minutes or more earns 1 point. Someone active on 7 days gets 7 points; someone who runs one long session gets 1 point for that day.
WHO’s guidance is explicit that any amount of physical activity is better than none and that all physical activity counts. Counting by day matches that position better than counting total volume.
Principle 2: Set the entry level lower than you think
A threshold of 10 minutes a day is a sensible starting level because it is far below the 150 minutes a week recommendation, yet still builds a daily habit. A participant can enter with one short walk.
The common mistake is setting a 30-minute daily threshold “so it means something”. For someone who is not yet active, 30 continuous minutes is a target for month three, not day one.
Principle 3: No individual leaderboard
Every individual leaderboard produces a group of people at the bottom. For a newcomer, seeing your own name at the foot of the table week after week is a clearer reason to quit than any other.
What to do instead:
- Rank by team, with teams composed to mix ability levels.
- Show the share of each team’s members reaching the weekly threshold, not who is at the top.
- Report the number of first-time participants as a success measure for the programme.
Principle 4: Allow a restart every two weeks
Newcomers will miss a few weeks — illness, work, rain. If accumulated points never reset, they have no reason to come back. With 2-week stages and a points reset, the third week after an absence is a genuine fresh start.
Principle 5: Do not require a device
If the challenge requires a smartwatch, you have already excluded a large share of people who are not yet active. Allow manual logging, and treat manual logging as equally valid. This reduces the accuracy of the figures, but the figures exist only to operate the challenge — the goal is behaviour change, not absolute measurement.
Comparing the two design approaches
| Element | Design for active people | Design for newcomers |
|---|---|---|
| Unit | Total minutes, total km | Number of active days |
| Daily threshold | 30 minutes | 10 minutes |
| Ranking | Individual | Team only |
| Reset | Once at the end | Every 2 weeks |
| Device | Required | Not required |
| Success measure | Total volume | Share of participants still in at the end |
How to measure success
Three figures, in order of importance:
- The share submitting in the final week compared with week one. This is the main measure.
- The number of people who return after an absence of 2 weeks or more.
- Total active days across all participants. Not total minutes.
Total kilometres should be dropped from reporting: it encourages inflation and cannot be compared across groups.
Sources
- WHO, Guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behaviour (2020) — “some activity is better than none”.
- WHO, Physical activity fact sheet — intensity categories and the 150-minute weekly figure.
The thresholds and comparison table are design proposals from the editorial team.
Sources
- WHO — Guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behaviour — accessed 2026-10-28
- WHO — Physical activity fact sheet — accessed 2026-10-28