Mar 26

2020 January Challenge Review

Throughout January of this year, TrainAsONE held a challenge to all of our users (both free and paid). The challenge was simple, to try and stick to as many of your scheduled workouts as possible. For every workout completed within 10%, users were rewarded with an angel emoticon, and conversely a devil emoticon for those that fell outside that range. As an added incentive, each angel was a ballot entry into a prize draw to win a number of prizes, including a Garmin sports watch.

For those that missed the prize draw announcement, our lucky winners were:

We had very positive feedback during the course of the challenge, and subsequently ran a survey to gather more objective and measurable data. Some of which, I would like to share with you here, primarily as a series of charts.

The participants were spread throughout the world, the greatest numbers being in the UK and USA.

Over 80% of participants were male!

The above chart clearly illustrates that an overwhelming proportion of our challenge participants were male. As just over 60% of TrainAsONE users are male, one would expect a preponderance of males. However, the disparity is considerable. Is this a manifestation of males considered to be more competitive? Were more males enticed to enter the competition, purely by the nature of the word ‘challenge’?

Nearly half of participants fell in the 40 to 50 year age group

Above we see the age range of our challenge participants, where nearly half of the people were in the 40 to 50 age group, with the 30 to 40 age group being the next most common. This distribution closely mirrors the total population of TrainAsONE users, though in the total population the 40 to 50 year group is not as pronounced.

The majority of participants ran between 3 and 6 runs per week, with a number of runners getting out over 31 times, i.e. more than once a day!

As one would expect, and illustrated above, there was a good spread in the total number of runs performed over the month by our challenge participants, with the most people completing between 12 and 24 runs. This equates to between 3 and 6 runs per week, which makes sense.

On average, participants received more Angels than Devils 🙂

Overall, 58% of the time participants managed to ‘hit’ their workout and received an Angel reward.

On average, participants running between 3 and 6 runs per week received an Angel for 59% of their runs.

Additionally we can see that the above 58% figure roughly holds true for those people performing between 3 and 6 runs per week. Their average ‘angel rate’ actually being a little higher at 59.4%.

Half of participants felt that the challenge difficulty was about right.

Just over half of participants felt that the difficulty of trying to adhere to their scheduled workouts (and receive an Angel) was about right. With similar numbers believing the challenge was either on the easy or on the difficult side. Fortunately, the smallest number of participants felt that the challenge was very difficult.

Almost 70% of participants found the challenge motivating or highly motivating

69% of participants found the challenge motivating, with 3% finding it demotivating at some level.

Whilst holding our January Challenge and subsequently analysing the gathered data has answered some of the questions we initially had, it has opened up many more. We’re already beginning to investigate these (such as why people have variation in ability to achieve workout adherence, and the level of motivation achieved from participating in the challenge).

Following the over-whelming response and positive feedback we will be running more challenges in the future. So keep a look out! And there is no better way to ensure you get personally notified, than having a TrainAsONE account.

Create your FREE TrainAsONE account now

Look out for more challenges in the future!

About The Author

Dr. Sean Radford, the Founder & CEO of TrainAsONE, is a medical doctor, IT expert, coach and podium finisher in international endurance events. He has dedicated more than 20 years to the research of health, fitness and social well-being of the general population. He has been developing Artificially Intelligent (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) tools to help tackle some of the world’s leading health issues. Dr Radford is a Tech Ambassador for the UK, considered a leading expert in his field, and is a regular speaker at key events, as well as an author of numerous research publications.

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