Welcome back for part 2 of our 3-part series for starting a fitness lifting competition at your gym or CrossFit box. Let’s get right to business!

If you’re just joining us, don’t forget to read Parts 1 and 3 below:

Part 1: 10 Steps to Starting a Fitness Lifting Competition

Part 3: 10 Steps to Starting a Fitness Lifting Competition

4. Define a List of Fitness Competition Events & Prize Payouts

Now that you’ve handled sponsorships and partnerships with another gym, you can finally start designing the fitness competition. What kind of events do you want to have? Deadlifts? Pullups? Snatches? Rowing? Pushups? Box Jumping? There are SO MANY possible athletic events, you’ll need to narrow down your competition to certain number of events.

One option(of many) is to design a bodyweight circuit workout that is timed. Something like a 100-yard dash, 50 push-ups, 25 pull-ups, 50 box jumps, another 100-yard dash, and then 1000 yards of rowing. When working with a bodyweight competition, you don’t need to have enough equipment for many participants. Also, you have less chance of having onsite injuries if your event is body-weight based. The final benefit of a bodyweight competition is that anyone can participate. Guys vs guys and girls vs girls. There’s no weight class or lifting requirements. If you’re having a weight lifting competition, how can a 115lb guy ever compete with a 250lb guy in bench press?

Take a look at some other fitness competitions out there and see what they’re doing. Don’t copy, imitate. 🙂

Lastly, you’ll need to decide if you’re paying out prize money or just dealing with bragging rights. If you were lucky enough to secure a solid amount of sponsors, you might have the money to give out to participates. One this is certain though, if you’re charing an entry fee for the fitness competitions and you’re NOT donating the proceed to a charity, you NEED to give back the entry-fee to the winners. Don’t try to make money off your fitness competition. Use it as a branding event, not a financial event.

5. Contact Your Insurance Company to Ensure Event Coverage

Wasn’t creating the event schedule fun? Now another boring part. Insurance! First and foremost, if you don’t have insurance for your facility, GO GET INSURANCE. You’re risking your life-savings(and maybe that of your spouse) if you are running an uninsured gym. If someone gets hurt while in your facility and you don’t have insurance to cover a lawsuit, they’re going to be coming at you. Heed the warning!

Give your insurance agent a call and ask them about the logistics about getting one-time event insurance for a fitness competition. Any agent worth their salary will find a way to write a policy for your event. It might cost a few hundred, but it’ll save you a helluva lot of stress if someone were to get hurt at your event and decide to file a lawsuit against your facility. You might not think it will happen, but friends sue each other all the time. It’s sad, but true.

6. Figure Out Parking Needs for Spectators and Participants

Now we’re getting into the nitty gritty of the event. You’ve created the event, got sponsors, and people are starting to sign up for it on your website(create an online signup form using Google Docs or something similar). If you’re getting participants, that means you’re going to have spectators. If you get 50 participants, you can expect 2 spectators per participant. Now we’re at 100 people. If 3 people come per car(which is being generous), you’ll need parking for 34 cars. Expect 50 cars. Can your current parking lot accommodate numbers like that? Does your business share a parking lot with other businesses? Are they going to be upset when their entire parking lot is taken up by your gym’s event? Does your city offer free street parking in your neighbor? You need to figure these things out. You don’t want the city getting angry with you. On that note, check out part 3 to learn about city permitting.

Thanks for coming back for part 2 of our 3-part series on setting up a fitness lifting competition. It might seem like a lot of work, but it’ll be worth it in the end when you have 100s of people hanging out in your gym, checking out your facility, and hopefully signing up for your FitnessTexter deal when they see your posters on the walls.