Today is the deadline to sign up for the Live Healthy Iowa “Next Step Challenge.” The effort to make Iowa the healthiest state in the nation started with a walk and now Live Healthy Iowa director, Nicole Bruce, says they are asking people to take this challenge.
“It takes place over six weeks and the teams of Iowans — two to ten people — they are competing in a web-based competition by tracking their number of steps they achieve each week,” Bruce explains. Anyone can sign up on-line to take part.
“Basically you are just going to form a team of two to ten people. You’re going to go to the website and just follow the steps to get started,” she says. Each teammember will have their own personal dashboard where they will track their progress. Bruce says each teammember uses a pedometer to track the steps they take.
“It’s a simple and easy way to kind of track your progress throughout the day, it kind of provides instant feedback to you. You can look down and say ‘hey I’ve only done this man steps today I need to add a thousand steps, how can I do that?’ Just looking at simple ways to become more active in your day,” Bruce says. Bruce says having a team of people get involved is important.
“The great thing about the team environment is to offer that motivation and support. Sometimes you will do things for others you won’t do for yourself, or if you are having an off day as well, you have other people to kind of pick you up and keep you moving. We feel like the team component is really a great social motivater to keep you moving,” according to Bruce.
There is a registration fee of $10 for each team member, and that includes a Live Healthy Iowa pedometer, weekly motivational emails, access to a personal online tracking page, recipes, workouts and health information. Sign up your team at : www.livehealthyiowa.org.