What is Gamification?
Gamification is a growing trend within the fitness industry. Its purpose is to enhance participation and motivation by adding personal strategic game mechanics to non-game situations. It can be applied to many areas of your life to enhance your likelihood of achieving your goals. In fact, large corporations have been doing this for years as a way to keep their customers sticking around for the long-term and improve their revenue. Common examples of this are reward cards, unique loyalty memberships and Visa cards. As of recently, even blood banks (“Blood Hero”) have used the concept of gamification to their advantage in order to keep their donors donating regularly. Let us talk about how you can gamify your fitness t to enhance your workout motivation!
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Gamify Your Fitness
- Prior to thinking about how you can turn fitness into a game, you will need to write down your long-term and a few short-term goals. This way you can structure your game towards achieving those goals and the game will have a greater meaning to you.
- Next up, you should think about how you want to reward yourself in your own, personal game. Here are a few ideas:
- Award yourself a prize at the end of the day/week/month (this can range from e.g. having a glass of wine with supper at the end of the day to treating yourself to a short getaway weekend at the end of the month)
- Ranks (you could go with the traditional “beginner” to “expert” ranks or create your own unique ranks to recognize your progress)
- Make a deal with a friend/your partner (“If I do not achieve __, then you can keep my __” – something that is of value to you)
- Diploma (create a diploma for yourself so you can forever recognize your efforts and accomplishments as a result of your game)
- A combination of 2+ of the above-listed rewards
3. Finally, you should add a point value to each task that you have to complete to achieve your goal. For example, if you are struggling with getting started early enough, assign 200 points to “getting started with the workout at 9am”. Then assign a point value to each exercise. For example “50 points for each set of push-ups completed”. At the end of the workout calculate all of your points and see what reward you qualify based on your reward system! You can get creative with this.
Tip: Make it somewhat easy for yourself to achieve your rewards at the beginning and then progressively make it harder.
Do you already have a potential game in mind? You can start off light by rewarding yourself with a delicious snack at the end of the day if you worked out for 10 minutes, accomplished your daily step goal, or if you finally complete that annoying task on your To-Do list that you have been neglecting for weeks.
I speak from experience when I say that the deeper and more detailed you get with this, the more fun it gets. At the end of the day, you will feel more productive than ever, and all of that while having more fun throughout the process! Try it out TODAY!
If you would like to learn more about how to stay motivated, as well as about the powers of gamification, tune in this weekend when I publish my next blog post about Fitness Gamification. In the post, I will be sharing my personal gamification strategies to improve my self-motivation and try and teach you how you can apply the same to your fitness and other areas of your life! I will see you there.
*Disclaimer*
I suggest that you speak to your doctor before starting any high intensity program. If you are worried that a high-intensity program may cause a flare up or worsen a current physical injury, speak to your physical therapist before starting an exercise program.
I want to be transparent with you so I am disclosing that there may be some affiliate links within my newsletters. Given this information, you can assume that I will receive a small commission from any links included. That being said, I truly only promote products or services that I believe deliver great value to you and support you in your journey of becoming a happier version of yourself through exercise!