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In February, Anytime Fitness, Lee’s Summit enrolled as a group in the Lee’s Summit Billion Step Challenge.  In order to get our members motivated to track their mileage/steps, we created an internal contest that continues to run until the end of December, 2009.  The club members are responsible to enter the number of miles they completed on the treadmill, elliptical or bike.  According to the Billion Step Challenge rules, the participants also entered all steps taken inside and outside the club.

We started with a large banner over the office window to announce the new contest to everyone in addition to signs posted in strategic locations around the club.  Each club member is responsible for recording their individual mileage on a form we created especially for this contest. I record it in an Excel document and on a large chart displayed in the club.

Some of our members are long-distance bikers as well as triathalon participants, but most of them are people that consistently logged mileage day after day. One member is 69 years old and at the beginning of the contest she could only walk one-half a mile each day. Through consistent and persistent determination, she now walks about 20 miles each week.  Several of our members have logged over 500 miles and a couple have exceeded 700 miles since the first of the year.  However, most of our members track their accomplishments to challenge themselves and to keep making progress in their goal of a healthier lifestyle.

The theme of our contest is “Why Don’t You Take Five Friends and Go Jump in the Lake?”  The winner of our internal contest receives a one-week stay in a condo at the Lake of the Ozarks in July, 2010.  The condo sleeps six persons so there is plenty of room to take the entire family or five friends.  Now that is a pretty good payoff just for tracking what you were going to do anyway!

As of the end of June, the members of Anytime Fitness had contributed over 45,000,000 steps to the Billion Step Challenge.  That is approximately 40% of the total steps recorded for Lee’s Summit.  You can track our progress on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.  Visit our Website at http://www.anytimefitness.com/en-us/clubs/65/Lee’s-Summit-MO-health-club.

Are you a member at a gym? Does your gym ever have any contests like this? Let us know in the comments.

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