Almost every single week I write about how to institute fitness into your life. Each article is about exercises or routines to strengthen your body or improve your cardio. This week I am going to go against one of my norms. I am going to address a team fitness concept. I am in the military and fitness is vital to our ability to operate in the environments that we do; however, many companies are starting to toot the fitness bugle as well. It is a much needed cultural change. The best way to help this change in behavior is to have a friendly competition.

This particular routine is called the warrior challenge. You will only need some type of cones or other form of markers to denote the different stations and a field.

Break up the group into teams of at least nine (anything up to 15 is fine). Then set up five cones. The first four cones place them in a straight line about 30 feet apart and the fifth one place about 60 feet ahead of the other four. This makes one lane and you can have people on both sides of the cone per lane.

The team lines up behind the fifth cone and looks down the lane at the other four. Then take four people from the line and have them stand next to each of the four cones. You are now prepped to begin.

The beauty of this is that you can pick any exercises that you want to make it easier or even more challenging. You can even have a theme like legs and arms or whatever you like. For the sake of this article, we will go with legs and arms.

The first cone will be standing squats. The second cone pushups. The third cone lunges. Finally, the fourth will be jumping jacks.

Once you start, those perched by the cones begin the exercises and keep count. The first person in line behind the fifth cone runs all the way to the last cone and replaces the person doing squats. The squat person then replaces the push up person. The push up person starts lunges and the lunge person goes to the jumping jack station. This jumping jack person runs to the fifth cone and tags the next person in the line and starts it over.

You have a couple of other options too. We like to make it a communication challenge too by passing the number of completed exercises to the person tagging you out. This becomes a challenge as people forget the number or hear it wrong. Or you can have designated counters to have more accountability. The choice is yours.

We normally do this for about 15 minutes and then tally the numbers and have the top teams face off for the champion and the bottom teams face off for the loser bracket champion.

It is a very fun way to get everyone involved and spark the fitness culture in your organization.