Try a new P3 challenge. Plan a new P3 challenge with sleep, activity, and nutrition with your unit and colleagues.
The Best Way to Implement Performance Triad Challenges:
- Let teams pick the challenge (length, focus area, incentives).
- Announce the challenge in multiple ways and at multiple times.
- Make it easy to participate for all team members.
- Have fun!
P3 challenges are short-term behavior change contests, interventions, and team activities designed to improve health and Soldier/employee morale.
Daily Themes
- Sleep: No caffeine 6 hours before bed, getting 7+ hours of quality sleep a night, limiting alcohol, etc.
- Activity: Army Combat Fitness Test (ACFT) activities, walking, running, paddling, biking, swimming, gardening, weight training, dancing, high intensity interval training [HIIT], aerobics, elliptical, rowing, circuit training, stretching, burpees, jumping jacks, lunges, squats, etc.
- Nutrition: Eating breakfast every day, eating 8 servings of fruits and vegetables, cooking challenges, drinking 64 ounces of water a day, etc.
- Resilience: Do an act of kindness each day, do a stress-relieving activity for 10 minutes each day, read for fun, or write down one thing you are grateful for each day.
Weekly Themes
- A roll-up of daily ideas for sleep, activity, and nutrition.
- Consider running two consecutive challenges where the daily goal increases week-to-week. Try challenges with a streak mode. This will incentive team members to keep going. No one wants to be the link that drops the streak.
Monthly Themes
Incorporate an overall theme, and then team members can contribute as a team or individually. It could be to complete a certain distance within a month or over a couple of months. Try a certain distance for a challenge such as:
- Your hometown to the next town.
- Inca Trail - 26.2 miles (42 kilometers (km)) along the Inca Trail in beautiful Andes Mountains in Peru.
- Hadrian's Wall - At 73 miles (80 Roman miles) long, it crossed northern Britain from Wallsend on the River Tyne in the east to Bowness-on-Solway in the west. The most famous of all the frontiers of the Roman Empire, Hadrian's Wall was made a World Heritage Site in 1987.
- The Camino de Santiago - 480 miles (772 km) along the pilgrims' ways leading to the shrine of the apostle Saint James the Great in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.
- Appalachian Trail - 2,190 miles from Georgia to Maine is a huge achievement.
Gather your Team members!
- Pick a team: Invite colleagues to join you and pick a team name. While these team activities are mostly meant to be fun, there is also a strong element of communication. Pick your challenge and set your goals.
- Push-ups: Is the challenge going to be a daily goal such as 2 minutes of push-ups each day? Regardless of how your remote team members feel about push-ups, one thing remains true: it is an excellent full-body exercise for getting a little stronger. Another advantage of push-ups is that you can do them nearly anywhere, including at home. Are you going to keep a weekly score? How about a monthly score? What is the incentive?
- Plank Challenge: Planking is great for core stability and can be done in a short amount of time. Employers can challenge participating employees to plank a set time each day, with times increasing 5 seconds each day to reach a certain time goal over 3‒5 weeks. Plank challenges can be done as a team (where those who have the best completion percentage win) or individually.
- Recipe Roundup: Invite your remote team to participate in a recipe roundup, which could have themes like:
- Red, white, and blue recipes
- Summer grilling recipes
- Summer fruit recipes
- Completion: Gather a location to submit photos or log individual scores.
- Incentives: This could be just "bragging rights," photos posted on the employee newsletter, team acknowledgements at meetings, etc.
For the Family
Virtual Healthy Kids Running Series
If your kids who need the push (away from the TV and the video games and outside into the fresh air), here is a Healthy Kids Running Series. And there's motivation for you to keep moving too!
- 50 yard dash (150 feet) – 2/3 years old
- 75 yard dash (225 feet) – 4/5 years old
- ¼ mile (1,320 feet) – Kindergarten and 1st grade
- ½ mile (2,640 feet) – 2nd and 3rd grade
- 1 mile (5,280 feet) – 4th and 5th grade
- 1 mile (5,280 feet) – 6th, 7th, 8th grade
