10-Day Fitness Challenge for Women - Get Stronger and Healthier

Are you experiencing breathlessness after taking the stairs, tighter-fitting jeans, or lack of energy? These are the signs your health and fitness are slowly getting away from you.

We get it!  As women, work, family, and life commitments chew up every ounce of spare time, making it harder than ever to step back into the gym or recreational activity.

If this is you, then it's time you try our 10-day fitness challenge! A challenge that can help reset your routine and reprioritize your health and your needs.

Why a 10-Day Fitness Challenge?

Fitness challenges are excellent ways to help us refocus and re-engage with our health. While certain challenges aim for rapid weight loss or muscle growth, this 10-day fitness challenge addresses areas such as strength training, cardio, flexibility, mobility, and recovery. We aim to help you gently reactivate muscle groups, loosen up joints, and reset your focus to regain control of your health.

Benefits of Short-Term Fitness Challenges

There are several benefits to undertaking a short-term fitness plan including resetting your routine and activating and lengthening muscles. Below, we detail benefits to show you how effective short-term fitness challenges can be for your health.

Re-engage and Activate Muscles

Short-term fitness challenges are excellent for re-engaging and activating muscle tissue. After weeks and months of inactivity, muscle mass can decline. Short-term challenges can contain resistance training sessions which can reintroduce movements such as squats, lunges, rows, and presses to increase blood flow to our working muscles and begin reactivating muscle tissue.

If you are returning to exercise start with a lighter weight and focus each movement with the correct technique. To reactivate your muscles, focus on tensing your target muscle with each repetition. For example, when you perform a cable row, focus on squeezing your back muscles. This will help you establish a mind-muscle connection which has been shown to improve results.

Improve Flexibility and Mobilize Joints

Short-term challenges can help reintroduce flexibility and mobilize joints. Periods of inactivity can shorten muscle tissue. Whether you are spending long hours in traffic, at your desk, or simply not challenging your muscles, they can shorten while reducing joint mobility.

In fact, a sedentary posture like sitting at a desk can reduce spinal mobility, narrowing of spinal joints, and muscle stiffness, leading to back pain, and decreased lung capacity and function.

Short-term challenges can include yoga, flexibility, and mobility sessions to address restricted joints and improve flexibility. Additionally, resistance training sessions expand muscle and joint range of motion, helping improve mobility. This can increase respiratory function, and blood flow leading to greater oxygen and nutrient supply to organs and tissue.

Improve Mental Clarity and Mood

Short-term fitness challenges can help improve mental clarity and mood. When we are inactive stress levels can increase which can impair mental clarity. For many, periods of inactivity can be due to a busy schedule which can increase stress.

When this happens there is often not enough time to decompress and relieve stress, and over time it can become chronic, leading to anxiety, depression, fatigue, reduced immune function, and increased risk of chronic illness.

Short-term challenges can act as a circuit breaker and pull you away from your stressor, improving cognitive function, mood, depression, and self-esteem.

Reset Routine

Short-term challenges can help you reset your exercise routine and re-establish health habits. Getting back to exercise can be incredibly difficult, with many of us struggling to find the time to exercise. However, there is always somehow time to fit in another meeting or errand, indicating your personal health and well-being is a low priority.

Sure, serving others and putting our family first is great, but putting yourself and your health off can lead to dramatic health declines. This sadly results in loss of function and increased risk of chronic illness, negatively impacting quality of life and reducing life expectancy. Inversely, physical activity can reduce the risk of death by approximately 20%–35%, reducing the risk of high blood pressure coronary heart disease, and cancer.

As mentioned, short-term challenges don’t always need to be about gut-wrenching workouts in pursuit of incredible results. Sometimes they can be just about putting yourself and your health first. This will help get you moving again to improve your quality of life.

How to Prepare for the Challenge

Before you dive into your 10-day fitness challenge, there are a few things to prepare. Below, we list tips including setting goals, recording, testing fitness levels, and setting up your space to ensure a successful short-term challenge.

Set A Schedule

First off, you must set a schedule. Chances are the reason you stopped training was due to a scheduling conflict as almost every other aspect of life became a priority. But now things are different. Now, you’re going to prioritize your health.

To do this you designate training times for the next 10 days, set them in your calendar, and let everyone know these are your training times. Like setting appointments and meetings or taking kids to sports practice, designating time makes it a priority, and showing up each session are you keeping a promise to yourself and respecting your need to regain your health, recharge, and re-energize.

When setting your schedule we recommend setting with the intention of continuing your training after the 10-day challenge is complete. While you will likely not be training every day, setting regular times now will help cement your routine for future sessions.

Setting Your Fitness Goals

Setting your goals is essential when preparing for your challenge. While only short-term, it can help establish great habits for what to expect from your training. For those returning to exercise, setting goals should be about re-establishing healthy practices rather than achieving rapid results. However, if you are currently on the fitter side and want to up the ante, you can push harder for better short-term results.

Below is a list of example goals that are great for 10-day fitness challenges:

• Improve flexibility and mobility
• Activate muscles
• Walk 7,000–10,000 steps daily
• Drink 3 liters of water daily
• Eat 25-30 grams of protein in each meal
• Reduce calorie-dense and processed foods

These goals follow the SMART principles which stand for, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. Let’s use walking 7,000 per day as an example.

• Specific: Walk 7,000 steps daily.
• Measurable: Measuring total daily steps.
• Achievable: 7,000 steps can be performed with incidental walking.
• Relevant: Improve fitness, cognition, and mood
• Time-Bound: Walk every day for 10 days.

Test Fitness and Record Energy Levels

Once your goals are set you can begin recording your baseline fitness and energy levels. These are an important component of the 10-day challenge as they illustrate your current level of fitness which you will refer back to at the end of the 10 days. This is essential as it shows your progress and shows you how far you have come in such a short time, providing additional motivation to continue after your challenge.

Below is a baseline fitness test that can help you record your baseline fitness. We recommend performing this before your first day of the challenge to allow for one rest day before it begins. Furthermore, record your performance and energy levels. This will help you reflect on your progress.

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Test Fitness and Record Energy Levels

Once your goals are set you can begin recording your baseline fitness and energy levels. These are an important component of the 10-day challenge as they illustrate your current level of fitness which you will refer back to at the end of the 10 days. This is essential as it shows your progress and shows you how far you have come in such a short time, providing additional motivation to continue after your challenge.

Below is a baseline fitness test that can help you record your baseline fitness. We recommend performing this before your first day of the challenge to allow for one rest day before it begins. Furthermore, record your performance and energy levels. This will help you reflect on your progress.

The 10-Day Fitness Challenge Breakdown

This 10-day fitness challenge is designed to help you return to exercise. It covers resistance training, cardio, flexibility, and recovery to help get you moving. If you would like to lose weight you must enter a calorie deficit. This is consuming fewer calories than you are burning to burn body fat.

Each day contains a brief description and program providing all the information you need to complete the 10-day challenge.

Day 1: Full-Body Strength Training

• Total Duration: 50–55 minutes

This full-body strength training routine is designed to start building muscle mass, strength, and function. Below, we detail exercises, sets, repetitions, and rest time for the best results.

For each exercise focus on tensing your target muscles to increase activation and develop your mind-muscle connection.

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Day 2: Cardio and Core Focus

• Total Duration: 55–60 minutes

This cardio and core program contains a gentle warm-up before a core workout. This cardio and core routine can help you safely improve core strength and aerobic fitness.

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Day 3: Flexibility and Mobility (Yoga or Stretching)

• Total Duration: 60–70 minutes

This flexibility and mobility slow down the process, helping you improve bodily awareness while improving your joint range of motion. This session will begin with a light warm-up followed by a series of stretches, yoga poses, and mobility exercises to lengthen muscles and mobilize joints.

When performing your exercises aim to test your range of motion while avoiding pain. This will help you safely improve mobility and flexibility. Because of this, they can be used after your session of after long hours in the seat position to loosen up your muscles and joints.

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Day 4: Upper Body Strength and Toning

• Total Duration: 45–50 minutes

This upper-body strength workout is excellent for increasing muscle growth and tone. Dedicating entire workouts to specific body parts allows you to spend more time building and engaging muscle groups, and re-establishing your mind-muscle connection.

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Day 5: Active Recovery (Light Walk or Stretch)

• Total Duration: 35–40 minutes

Recovery is one of the most important components of the 10-day challenge allowing us to rest, repair muscle tissue, and replenish energy. While many believe this to be a complete day of training, we want you to lock it into your schedule and take the time to go for a walk, get a massage, and do some light stretching.

Below is an active recovery program to ensure you are well-rested and fresh for the second half of the 10-day challenge.

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Day 6: Lower Body Strength and Glutes

• Total Duration: 45–50 minutes

This lower body strength workout allows you to spend more time engaging your legs and glutes. Like the upper-body workout, it increases the number of exercises, increasing training volume which can improve growth. This combined with a calorie deficit will help burn fat to reveal strong, toned legs.

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Day 7: Cardio Burnout

• Total Duration: 15-20 minutes

The following workout is where we increase intensity, elevate heart rate, and take our training to the next level. This may sound a little scary, however, it is much shorter in duration and can be taken at your own pace.

Cardio burnout is a high-intensity interval training (HIIT) circuit designed to increase your heart rate, exercise capacity, and endurance. The session will consist of a short warm-up and two short circuits totaling 15 minutes.

The session will be performed in a 20-second on, 10-second off format, with a 60-second rest between rounds. The 10-second break between exercises will give you just enough time to switch exercises. Additionally, if you are a beginner or returning from a break, take longer rest between rounds and keep moving.

Cardio Burnout Circuit

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Day 8: Core and Balance Work

• Total Duration: 50–55 minutes

This workout changes things up, reinforcing core strength and improving balance. This program aims to activate and engage your core muscles before performing a range of balancing exercises.

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Day 9: Total Body Circuit Training

• Total Duration: 55–60 minutes

The total body circuit training takes the principles of back-to-back exercise used in the high-intensity cardio burnout workout by applying them in a more relaxed fashion.

Each exercise should be performed one after another with little rest between sets, with a 60-second rest at the end of each round. Because of this, exercises will target opposing muscle groups to reduce fatigue. The focus during this session is to engage your target muscles and to complete the designated repetitions.

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Day 10: Stretch and Reflection

• Total Duration: 50–60 minutes

The tenth and final day of your 10-day challenge is focused on stretching and reflecting on your progress. This program is identical to your Day 5 active recovery program, however, during this day we want you to make an honest assessment of your performance, energy levels, and mental state and write them down alongside your fitness testing notes.

While it isn’t always possible to achieve incredible results during short-term challenges, they can show us what we are made of as we regain control of our health.

Furthermore, we want you to use this time to create a realistic schedule with short-, medium-, and long-term goals. Scheduling post-challenge typically offers more flexibility as you can reduce training to three to four sessions per week. Doing this during your session you will lock in your new routine to continue improving your health.

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Re-Testing and Record Energy Levels

Now that you have completed your 10-day challenge it is time to re-test and monitor your progress. This session can be performed on the 11th day or a couple of days after to allow you to freshen up. Before your test, write down how you are feeling, your mental state, and your current energy levels. Once you have completed your testing, reflect on your results and be proud of what you have achieved over the last 10 days.

Benefits of Completing the 10-Day Challenge

Completing short-term challenges can often reveal things about ourselves that go beyond physical changes. Below, we discuss the benefits of completing the 10-day challenge

Improved Strength and Confidence

Short-term challenges can restore our physical strength, mental strength, and confidence. Returning to exercising after a break isn’t just the effort that makes it difficult to return, it can be a negative mental state. One that tells it's too hard, that it's not worth the effort, killing confidence.

Jumping into and completing a 10-day fitness challenge shows us that we are not only capable of returning to exercise but that we are capable of committing to stick to our goals.

While 10-day challenges sound short and at times insignificant compared to long-term goals, their back-to-back, intensity training session show us that we still got it. This can be a powerful thing that can help us boost our confidence, spurring us to pursue better health.

Enhanced Energy Levels and Flexibility

Completing your 10-day challenge will boost your energy levels and improve your flexibility. The short-term program isn’t always enough to make major gains, but the daily activity will reactivate muscles, and improve flexibility, and range of motion, enhancing function. This can make performing daily tasks easier.

Furthermore, 10 days of cleaner eating and exercise improvements to mental clarity and stress levels will increase energy levels, making it easier to get up and move each day. The combination of these factors will have you feeling reenergized to continue your active lifestyle.

Momentum for Longer Fitness Goals

The goal of doing this 10-day challenge was to get your health and fitness back on track. Short-term challenges provide momentum that can be used to continue longer-term goals.

As mentioned, we recommend setting longer fitness goals during your day-10 reflection. The feel-good hormones released at the end of your challenge will mean motivation is at an all-time high, enabling you to create SMART long-term fitness goals.

What to Do After the Challenge Ends

It's clear that challenges are great for kickstarting our fitness journey again, but many people struggle to find the next step in their fitness journey. While training intensely in short bursts is great for getting moving again, it can reinforce an all-or-nothing mentality.

The problem is that when the challenge is complete and training returns to a three to a four-day weekly workout routine, motivation levels can dwindle as rest days interrupt our momentum.

So, how can we ensure a smooth transition into a healthy fitness routine? Below, we discuss our tips for what to do when a challenge ends including transitioning to regular training, building on progress, and staying motivated.

Transitioning to a Regular Fitness Routine

Transitioning to a regular fitness routine requires proper planning. Think about it, the reason you dropped off your training is likely because every other aspect of life got in the way.

Now the challenge is complete, you have proven to yourself that you can create a schedule and stick to it. The key here is to maintain that schedule and commitment to yourself.

Here are things you can do to help you transition to a regular fitness routine.

• Create a three to four-day-per-week training program
• Set longer-term fitness goals
• Perform brisk walks on off days to continue the momentum.
• Continue performing your favorite workouts
• Begin tracking your nutrition, reducing processed foods, and prioritizing protein intake.

These may seem like little things, but together they can have a huge impact, improving your chances of transitioning to a regular fitness routine.

Building on the Progress You’ve Made

Once your challenge is complete the best thing we can do is to continue performing training to build on our progress. We recommend selecting two resistance training sessions, a cardio session, and a mobility session.

Recap: How To Stay Motivated

Fitness challenges are incredible for reestablishing our fitness routines. Their short time frame enables us to become hyperfocused on our goals, and train hard knowing that the end is just around the corner.

However, this can foster the all-or-nothing mindset, which means we must do our best to pursue long-term fitness goals once the challenge is complete. This can be achieved by:

• Committing to a three to four-day-per-week training schedule.
• Setting longer-term fitness goals.
• Perform brisk walks on off days to continue the momentum.
• Continue performing your favorite workouts
• Begin tracking your nutrition, reducing processed foods, and prioritizing protein intake.

If you are considering trying our 10-day fitness challenge be sure to:

• Lock in your training Schedule
• Identify and set SMART goals
• Test and retest your fitness levels
• Recover energy levels
• Follow our programming recommendation

This will help keep you accountable and provide you with data on your progress during the challenge which can be incredible to look back on. Do this and you will launch into a new fitness chapter.

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