Your workouts and your personality are only part of the reason that your bootcampers keep coming back. The next biggest reason (or the biggest to some) is the other people who attend your bootcamp.
It’s important therefore, to try and get new clients to get to know your awesome campers as quickly as possible.
The best way to to this is during your group sessions. Include ice breakers, games and team based drills to get them talking and building some camaraderie. Tough situations bring people together, and your tough bootcamps can do that in small doses each day.
Keeping Score
Score keeping is one of the easiest ways to get teams to compete against each other. Each drill in this workout has a different scoring method as a bit of an example on different ways you can score.
Use a white board to keep track of the score through out the workout and get people excited by calling out the scores at the end of each drill. Let teams at the bottom know how close they are and the teams in the lead that the wolves are hungry at their door.
Important! Don’t turn your bootcamp into an anti-competitive environment. Keep things light by adding and subtracting points through out the workout for things like not paying attention, doing poor reps (especially if it’s a very fit client who is slacking off) and good team work.
Before you start this workout, make sure you start off with a good warm up.
Then split your group into teams of roughly equal fitness. This workout works best if you have an even number of teams (2, 4, 6, 8, etc)
1. Card Race
Grab your trusty deck of playing cards and remove these numbers: jokers, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
Place the deck at the top of a short hill (think 30 metres) with the teams assembled at the bottom. Each team will send one member to sprint up the hill, grab a card off the top of the deck and then run back down to their team.
Once they arrive back at their team with the playing card, the entire team must carry out the exercise that card corresponds to. Here are some examples you can use:
Hearts = tuck jumps
Diamonds = KB deadlift high pull
Spade = sit up fives (feet locked with a partner, high 5 at the top of each simultaneous sit up)
Clubs = chest to deck push ups
The number of reps to be completed (by each member) equals the number on the card. Aces and face cards = 12 reps.
Once the card has been completed another team member can sprint up the hill to retrieve another card. Teams should continue until all of the cards are gone. If you have a lot of teams (6 or more) you will want to use two decks of cards.
Point Scoring: Once a team completes a card they should put it in a team pile. Teams get 1 point for every number card they completed and 2 points for every face card and ace.
2. Minefield
Divide the group into 2 teams.
Team 1 heads off together on Route A and will set 10 ‘mines’ along their route by placing a cone down on the ground. To ‘activate’ the mine, the entire team must do a set of Good Mornings.
Team 2 heads off together on Route B and will set 10 ‘mines’ along their route by placing a cone down on the ground. To ‘activate’ the mine, the entire team must do a set of Prisoner Squats. Once both teams have returned from setting their mines, they swap over routes.
This time, the objective is to find and ‘disarm’ the mines that the other team have set by doing the opposite set of exercises ie. Team 2 will disarm the cones on Route A by doing Good Mornings, Team 1 disarms the cones on Route B by doing Prisoner Squats.
Each team must return with all 10 cones. If they miss one, the entire group can be ‘penalised’ by either going back to retrieve it or doing 50 situps.
Point Scoring: 2 points for each cone they returned with.
3. Tug-Of-War
Finish off the workout with a good ol’ fashion game of tug-of-war.
Pick a safe area to set up and keep the games short by playing the first team to have a foot to cross the centre line loses.
Assuming you have four teams. Team 1 and 2 play 3 rounds against each other. Then teams 3 and 4 play 3 rounds against each other. Then the two winning teams play each other and finally the two losing teams.
Tip: If one team is really struggling to win, sneakily give their end of the rope a bit of help.
Point scoring: 5 points for every tug-of-war won.
A Final Word On Point Scoring
I’ve allowed for small amounts of points, like 2 or 5 points, to be scored at each drill. You may decide that you want to make things more exciting by allowing teams to score 100 points for each card and so on with the goal to reach 2,000 points.
Also a final tip for time efficient team naming. Set a 30 second timer for the teams to brainstorm a team name. For every second they take longer then 30 they lose a point (and therefore start at a negative).
Who else uses point scoring or team building drills in their bootcamps?
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Kyle Wood created Bootcamp Ideas in 2010 when he was hunting around on the internet for workout ideas. He ran a successful bootcamp in Victoria, Australia and spends his spare time managing this site, adventuring (or lazying) with his wife and find new ways to make bootcamps even better.
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