Many of our challenge organisers choose to run a step challenge where participants manually log walking/running or sync their daily step total to our app. This article describes how different types of activity are recorded (and converted) and also how the progress along the challenge route is calculated.

For each activity uploaded or daily total synced on Big Team Challenge, we store both the distance (in Kilometers/Miles) and the equivalent Steps (as determined below).

Our global ratio for converting from Steps to Meters (also sometimes called a 'stride length') is:

We've chosen this based on our experience, and as an average value for various stride lengths which depend on someone's height and activity (walking vs running).

When participants manually add an activity to the challenge, we ask:

If you choose Kilometers or Miles, we convert to Steps using our global ratio (see below. If you choose Steps, we convert to Kilometers/Miles using our global ratio.

If your challenge organiser has enabled 'Other' then our built-in activity conversion feature will convert from minutes into steps. We then convert to Kilometers/Miles using our global ratio.

When participants sync their daily steps to the challenge, we store both the distance (in Kilometers/Miles) and the Steps.

Fitbit and Apple Health provide both Steps and Meters (depending on the user's permission settings), so we sync a participant's personal distance (in Kilometers/Miles) and steps. We do not convert using the global ratio and therefore the distance to Steps ratio (i.e. stride length) may be different to other participants.

Garmin and Health Connect unfortunately only provide Steps - the equivalent distance (in Kilometers/Miles) is not provided in their integrations. We therefore convert from Steps into Kilometers/Miles using our global ratio.

Our virtual challenge routes are measured in Kilometers and follow walking directions (between each milestone) provided by Google Maps. For example, our London to Paris route is 610 Kilometres long in total, with the first leg from London, England to Canterbury, England measuring at 89.7 Kilometers.

Note: For custom made routes, we may also occasionally adjust the distances between milestones to make the total distance more achievable for your challenge requirements.

Since each activity or daily sync total stores both the distance (in Kilometers/Miles) and Steps, we can calculate both the cumulative total distance and cumulative total Steps for each user and team.

Teams vs Teams is our standard mode. Teams try to complete the route on their own (from their teams' cumulative distance).

The One Big Challenge mode on the other hand allows all teams to work together, combining their distance along one of our longer routes (eg. an around-the-world challenge!).

The cumulative distance (in Kilometers/Miles) is used to calculate the progress along the route (e.g. 10%) as well unlocking each milestone. This is because the route itself is measures in kilometers.