Hey Team,
Welcome to another week. Really happy with the first couple of weeks of the “TUESDAY CHAMPIONSHIP” series…Bike and Rower are done (different champs crowned each week) and it really does add a bit of a different vibe to the gym once a week. For me (right now anyway) it is really something to look forward too – from both a coaching and a participant perspective – and I’m already looking forward to the SPARC race next week. Will this go ‘FOREVER’ – well…I think that’s pretty unlikely! BUT I have scheduled it for 15 weeks (3x blocks of 5-weeks) and from there we’ll give it a bit of a break for a while…but that 3-4 month period feels about ‘right’ as things sit right now…
Today I wanted to cover off on the Survey we sent out last week – basically we wanted to try and take the temperature of the Challenge folks in a few pretty simple areas:
-Gym Attendance
-Sleep
-Mood
-Energy Levels
-Away from the gym’ exercise
The survey that went out was pretty simple – a multi choice answer re attendance, a 1-10 ‘slider’ for sleep/mood/energy (where 1 = bad, 10 = AMAZING) and then back to a multi-choice answer for ‘Away from the Gym’ exercise…there was also the option for respondees to add a bit of a comment about exactly WHAT they were doing outside of the gym. So I guess the survey was more than ‘a bit’ simple…it was incredibly simple. But hopefully we go something we can use for comparative date in 6-weeks time (post-challenge).
Anyway, here’s what it says (and we have had responses from approx 85% of challenge participants…of course, I would have liked 100% for a 1-minute survey but, well, you get what you get! And to be fair there are a couple of people who haven’t collected their packs yet, so…
Gym Attendance:
I guess I was a BIT surprised to see a relatively high percentage of people who were essentially NOT attending at all pre-challenge. The challenge was not opened up to non-members so I probably expected a higher number of 1-2 sessions per week and lower number of ‘Not attending’ but that’s why surveys are helpful…and I guess (I mean, we already look at this data from the check-in system) a lot of challenge participants are using the challenge to redrive their ‘gym’ habits. Which (of course) is GOOD!!
Energy – Mood – Sleep –
This was interesting in that there were 3x questions but the slider finished in pretty much EXACTLY the same spot for all 3. Half-way.
What is all of this saying? Well – I guess to me it means that most people think about all 3 things as ‘average’ and would like to be sleeping better, feeling more energetic AND more positive. EVERY day. I guess there is no mystery to that – life is pretty much chaotic for every single person I talk to these days – work, family, etc – it’s almost as if for most people in 2022 downtime doesn’t exist (or it is 10 minutes snatched here or 30-minutes there) and the ‘pressure’ feels relentless…
Ultimately in many ways I guess this is what we expected – hence the series of ‘Little Things’ challenges that are such a core part of this challenge…plant a tree, contact an old friend, listen to music, read a book…the list of ‘Little Things’ goes on and the idea is to try and knock off 30 of them over the duration of the challenge. I guess overall the plan is that by finding a bit more time to exercise AND at the same time cleaning up our eating and making time to do things OTHER than work/crash on the couch that MOOD, ENERGY and SLEEP will all improve.
In some ways I guess the little things could really be thought of as finding a way to SEPARATE your ‘WORKING LIFE’ (whatever that looks like) from the rest of your life through activities that have a PURPOSE. I know for me when I’m at my ‘worst’ with regards to ‘MOOD’ and ‘ENERGY’ it is because work feels overwhelming/all encompassing…and I respond to that by ‘crashing’ on the couch, when what I *SHOULD* do is go for a walk, play my guitar…you know, do something that will allow me to actually take my mind of things.
The final question of the survey was how many times per week do you do an ‘EXTRA’ workout (as in, AWAY from the gym) and the results looked like this:
I guess in many ways I was surprised – in a good way – that after seeing so many “I don’t go to the gym” responses that so many people were getting out for a walk/run/swim (‘walk’ or ‘walk the dog’ were by FAR the most popular comments though the answers ‘As Rihanna would say…Work work work work work’ and ‘Eat food, drink alcohol and eat too many Tim tams’ provided some welcome comedy relief when I was reviewing the responses).
Getting outside for a walk a couple of times per week – especially if you can leave the technology alone and just be ‘in your own head’ is an amazing way to relax and recharge whilst ALSO getting in some exercise. If you can build this into a 10000+ steps per day habit (there was a great Tip Tuesday Coach Gabby wrote on this a few weeks back: https://round1fitness.com.au/tip-tuesday-why-steps/) well…all the BETTER!
Anyway – that’s it for now. I’m looking forward to the post challenge survey when everyone’s life has been transformed and the MOOD-SLEEP-ENERGY scores are “10’s” across the board. Or maybe just improved a little bit because that would be good too!
See you in the gym,
Michael.
