Can I just enter all of my activity information at once?

Challenge Hound works best when each individual activity is entered as the challenge progresses. Entering lump sums is strongly discouraged.

When participants in a challenge see other participants completing activities and progressing towards the goal it is highly motivating. One of the main benefits of Challenge Hound is getting participants engaged through friendly competition by creating participant leaderboards and posting recent activity. Competition is a far stronger motivation for exercise than friendly support. It makes exercise contagious. It makes challenges engaging.

Entering lump sums of many activities in one entry can frustrate other participants and takes away from the power of Challenge Hound. If you are entering activities for multiple people in a single Challenge Hound activity it can be seen as unfair when comparing the efforts of other participants in the leaderboards. Nobody wants to personally compete against an anonymous team of lump sum entries.

Furthermore, lump sum entries lead to skepticism and questions concerning efforts. When a participants notices another participant log a three mile run, it is motivating to get out and log a three mile run. When a participant sees a lump sum entry of 25 miles for running, it is not motivating. It is confusing and alienating.

Challenge Hound makes is extremely easy to enter each activity individually. The Challenge Hound activity form is only a few fields and easy to use. In addition, we provide multiple integrations with third party apps to completely eliminate the need to manually enter activities. 

Here are some articles to further the case for individual entries...

Want To Exercise More? Get Yourself Some Competition

A new study to be published in the journal Preventive Medicine Reports from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania found that competition was a far stronger motivation for exercise than friendly support. In fact, giving people friendly support actually made them less likely to go to the gym than simply leaving them alone. Overwhelmingly, competition motivated participants to exercise the most, with attendance rates 90% higher in the competitive groups than in the control group.

Exercise Is Socially Contagious

Scientists found that through social networks runners clearly influence one another. Over all, if one person ran for about 10 minutes more than usual on any given day, that runner’s friends would lengthen their workout by approximately three minutes, even if the weather was discouraging. Similarly, if a friend ran faster than usual, his or her friends would tend to pick up their pace in their runs that same day. Read More

Still need help? Contact Us Contact Us