Good Friends and the Gamification of Fitness

During this quest to find the right balance for a fit, fun and fabulous life, one thing has become very clear to me: the support, encouragement and partnership of friends is key. While friends are always in for the fun and fabulous part, those who support you in the fitness column can be harder to find. Fortunately for me, I have a group of friends who not only support and join in on the quest to be healthy, but also are finding ways to make fitness fun.

This week, several of us started a fitness challenge. Kellen the Inspiring, Kristen the Badass, Energizer Ben and Jim the Grillzmaster were all looking for some motivation to be a bit healthier. So over a generally nutritious dinner we decided to make a game of it. Here are our rules:

• We all put in $100, and say what fun thing we are going to do for ourselves if we get it back.
• Each of us set five goals to be met over the course of five weeks.
• If we meet four of the five goals, we get our money back.
• If we don’t hit five goals, we each picked a charity that we will donate the money to.

We started Monday, and Kellen made a spreadsheet on GoogleDocs so we can share and track progress. This is ridiculously motivating. To better explain, these are my goals and the way we track them:

All of us have our goals in a shareable, editable GoogleDoc.

While not all of our goals are things that are tracked day by day (like my goals to lose weight or run a faster 5K), most of them are. After a morning workout class, I drive into work in the morning and get excited about putting a “1” into the grid. Kellen and I were hanging out at an event with wine and we both agreed that drinking a glass wasn’t nearly as appealing as being able to enter a 1 in the “days without drinking” goal, which we both included in our list. The grid shows each of us how we are getting closer to meeting our goals, and shows off to the others that we are making progress. And because we’re all a bit competitive, seeing other people’s commitment just reinforces our own motivation.

We’re still in the first week, so it will be interesting to see if this motivation stays strong over the full five weeks. But so far it has been really successful. I’m lucky to have some fit, fun and fabulous friends. And if you are in search of a fitness friend, I’m always happy to make some side challenges, so please reach out!