3 Tips for Making Workouts a Social Activity

Sometimes, it seems like life is busier than ever. Employment, family activities, maintaining a household, and an array of other obligations can make it seem impossible to find time for exercise. When there don’t seem to be enough hours in the day for things that need to be done, it can be extremely difficult to force yourself to squeeze in a workout.

While some don’t have a problem with getting in those exercise sessions no matter what, most of us are far more likely to exercise consistently when it is a social activity. Group exercise increases accountability and engagement. This is key when it comes to making exercise a habit versus an occasional, shame-driven chore.

Working out with others doesn’t always mean joining a Zumba class or other class-style group. Here are a few ways to better achieve the social benefits of group exercise.

Keep Communication Simple

If you want your workout group to succeed, the scheduling process needs to require as little effort as possible. As mentioned before, life is busy. If finding available times and checking in on who is available on which dates creates wasted time and confusion, people just aren’t going to be as likely to participate on a long-term basis.

One easy solution is for the exercise group members to pick a recurring day and time each week and share their calendars. Just do a quick search on how to share Outlook calendars, and you can have your calendar shared with your workout group in minutes.

Sharing calendars eliminates the need for a lot of back-and-forth communication. Let’s say you have a Wednesday morning biking group, and all the members meet at your house at 7:00 a.m. to get started on the week’s ride. If two regularly attending members aren’t there on time, you can check their calendars to see if they have the time slot marked off for things like work obligations or family vacations. If that’s the case, everyone will know they won’t be coming, and the ride can begin.

Without sharing calendars, people need to send texts or emails to the group to let everyone know they won’t be attending. And if they forget to send that message, the group will be waiting for the missing person or sending a flurry of texts to see where they are.

Open Up “Workout Snacks” to Coworkers

For people with desk jobs, it’s all too easy to settle into a chair and work for hours at a time without getting up and moving. Four hours can go by before you realize the lower half of your body has gone numb, and you really should have taken in more fluids than just that one cup of burnt coffee loaded with birthday cake-flavored creamer.

Since it’s hard for most people to sneak away from the office to get in a proper 45-60 minute workout, “workout snacks” are a great way to make sure you get some movement in during the workday. A set of 10 pushups takes about thirty seconds. It might not seem like much, but a set of 10 pushups every hour can get you about 80 pushups a day. For people who would otherwise not do a single one, that’s a big deal.

Even if you and your coworkers aren’t doing the activities right next to each other, you can still make workout snacks a social activity. Most offices have some sort of internal instant messaging system. Create a separate group for everyone who wants to take part in the workout snacks and appoint a different person every day to send out an alert each hour with exercise instructions. Everyone who completes the workout snack sends a thumbs up on the activity announcement, and then it’s back to work.

Just doing that quick 30-second exercise gets everyone out of their chairs and provides a sense of accomplishment when they can add that thumbs up to the task announcement. It’s a great way to get a social boost and incorporate consistent little workouts with extremely low time commitment.

Make Competition Adaptable For Everyone

If you and your friends have competitive but fun loving personalities, getting a little exercise competition going can be a great time.

Before you propose anything to friends, though, make sure you think it through. Deciding what metric you’re competing on is very important. Competing on improvement or individual goals rather than the same end results is more likely to be motivating to the whole group.

Let’s say your group has a wide range of body types. You might have a very thin person who would like to put on muscle and maintain bone density. On the other end of the spectrum, you might have other people in the group who would like to lose weight and decrease stress on their joints. Unless everyone has the exact same fitness goals, measuring success by the number of pounds lost or the increase of calf muscle circumference isn’t going to motivate everyone.

Instead, success could be determined by each person’s individual improvement week over week or whether or not they hit certain milestones. You could create a 10-week competition in your group with everyone stating their individual goals for the end of the period and how they intend to achieve them. One person might want to lose 15 pounds, another person might want to hit a new PR for bench press, and another person might want to achieve at least 700,000 steps during the competition period.

Do a weekly check in with a group chat. Everyone can share their progression, successes, and setbacks. That way, people can have the feeling of both accountability and support.

Better Together

If you sometimes find it difficult to motivate yourself to hit the gym, you’re not alone. It’s extremely difficult to make the transition to exercise being a habit rather than an unpleasant obligation. So if you’re struggling, get a hold of your friends. As a group, you might be able to achieve wellness goals that you never thought you could achieve on your own.