Announcing the Weekend Warriors Challenge

In my original Weekend Warrior post, I talked about how much more of a challenge the weekends can be for those of us who are trying to be healthy and get fit. There are typically a lot of temptations for us to overeat, or make less than ideal food choices. And on Monday it shows. Looking at my daily weigh-in history, I see the same trend repeating itself over and over again: good progress during the week, followed by a plateau (or even a small peak) on the weekend.

Based on the comments I received on that post, I’m not alone in this. There are quite a few of you that struggle through the weekends as well. Based on a comment left by Craig, I came up with the idea of the Weekend Warriors Challenge.

The basic idea is that we’ll all challenge ourselves to do better on the weekends. “Better” can mean different things for different people. Maybe it has to do with eating better, or getting more exercise, or even a combination of the two. The point is, we’ll all set specific, measurable goals for ourselves for the weekend, and then report back on Monday on how we did.

I was originally hoping to be able to have the challenge ready for this weekend, but I realized that might be rushing it too much, and I want to give more time for other people to find out about the challenge and participate as well. So the challenge is actually going to be next weekend, March 6 & 7.

Just to make things semi-official around here, here’s the set of rules for the challenge that I came up with, based on the feedback I received on my last post:

• Set 2-3 goals for yourself for the weekend
• Goals can be anything, as long as they are health/fitness related in some way
• Goals must be specific and measurable, so that you can give a definitive pass/fail result at the end of the challenge. For example, “workout at least 30 minutes every day this weekend” is preferred over “get more exercise this weekend”.
• Sometime between now and next Friday (March 5), write a blog post about the challenge, and detail what your goals for the weekend are. Then, come back here and leave a comment with a link to your post, so we can all keep an eye on each other and offer encouragement.
• The Friday before the challenge starts (March 5), I’ll put up another post with a list of all the participants.
• The Monday after the challenge (March 8), I’ll put up a post where everyone can report back on how they did over the weekend.
• Everyone is encouraged to write an after-challenge post with your results, and link to all the other participants (my after-challenge post will have a list of all the participants with links, so it should be easy to just copy/paste that section). That way, we can raise more awareness of the challenge by getting the word out, and hopefully have even more participants next time. That, and everyone can share in a little link-lovin’!
• Everyone is also encouraged to tweet about the challenge using the #WeekendWarriors hashtag
• Maybe something like this: I’m participating in the #WeekendWarriors challenge from @SoLongFatAss, are you? http://bit.ly/bCIas2

Prizes

• None this time around, it’s more of an “everyone wins” type of challenge. If there’s enough interest this first go-around, then I’ll likely host this challenge again in the future. If so, I can look more into getting some “real” prizes next time. Besides, isn’t better health a good enough prize on its’ own?

I do have one request, if anyone is willing & able – it would be nice to have an image/badge/whatever you want to call it, that I can use for this challenge, and that everyone participating can post on their own blogs. Unfortunately, while I’m a programmer by day and can code my way around almost anything, I can’t do much when it comes to graphics. If anyone out there has been blessed with that ability, and would care to lend a hand, it would be greatly appreciated. Either leave a comment below, or use my contact page to get my attention.

Well, I think that’s it – good luck everyone!

Photo by Dunechaser

Tagged as: challenge, Fitness, goals, weight loss