Walking is integral to the college experience, and the rise in popularity of daily step counters gives people exercise goals to reach every day. University Recreation created the six-week Step To It Walking Challenge to encourage the creation of more active lifestyles. Through weekly submissions of step-counts, teams work together to win prizes and reach individual step goals.
Step To It encourages teams of two to 10 students or employees to track their daily step totals. Adam Sardinha, marketing and communication specialist at University Recreation, notes that the goal of the program is to get the Wolfpack moving with at least 10,000 steps per day, or 150 minutes of physical activity a week. These are the recommended amounts from the American College of Sports Medicine, which University Recreation used as a guideline for the challenge.
“Basically it’s a way for us to encourage movement,” Sardinha said. “We’ve seen a lot of research that hones in on the benefits, especially for students. Physical activity has an impact on sleep and minimizing depression, as well as overall academic performance.”
Walking for just 30 minutes a day is shown to reduce risk of heart disease and certain types of cancers, as well as positively influencing well-being and stress levels. The appeal of these benefits reach every member of the NC State community. Shannon Dupree, University Wellness specialist, was pleasantly surprised by the turnout of 427 students and employees.
“This is the first time we’ve done an all-campus wellness challenge,” Dupree said. “It started out as just a student challenge but we received so much interest from employees that we opened it up to them as well.”
Within the 58 registered teams, each member individually submits their weekly step count total, which contributes to their team’s average. Individuals who reach 70,000 steps a week are entered into raffles for NC State Dining sponsored prizes, such as yoga mats, cooking pans, water bottles, wine glasses and Pack in Action T-shirts.
“We send out a weekly newsletter that includes a leaderboard, showing the top four teams and individuals,” Dupree said. “At the end we will reward the top team with new Fitbits, and the highest individual stepper, a brand new mountain bike.”
Other forms of physical activity can be counted toward weekly step counts and are easily converted on the website. Activities can include anything from swimming, jogging, Pilates or a cardio dance group fitness class.
The Step To It Walking Challenge encourages walking as a primary starting-point exercise because it has the lowest dropout rate compared to other forms of physical activity. Directors of the program also noticed a competitiveness in the participants and among team captains to motivate participants to reach their weekly goals and submit count totals.
“The captain’s job is to keep your teammates motivated if they’re falling behind, and check in to see how they’re doing,” Dupree said. “They want to know how they’re doing and how they stack up and see what they could be doing differently.”
The team aspect of the Step To It is meant to create a sense of community for participants to fall back on.
“As long as you had two people you could participate,” Sardinha said. “The team challenge adds the competition aspect but also adds the support.”
This semester’s program began Oct. 9 and runs until Nov. 19, and University Recreation will sponsor the event again in the spring semester. Sign-up is on the University Recreation website.
“Some people are really surprised and inspired when they see they walked 50,000 steps in a week, because you really don’t know until you start to track it,” Dupree said. “That’s when people really get motivated and set goals, and that’s what we want to start through this.”
