Why Competing With Friends Works

The psychology behind accountability groups and how a little friendly competition keeps you showing up.

Challengers did not start as an app. It started as a Snapchat group called Challengers 25.

A few of us agreed to work out for at least 30 minutes a day, five days a week. After each workout, you had to post a video in the group as proof. We counted the number of days each person completed and scored the week out of five. One person kept the leaderboard by hand and updated everyone’s scores in the group chat.

It was a simple setup, but the competition got real very quickly. So did the consistency.

When someone posted their workout early in the day, it reminded everyone else that they still had theirs to do. When you saw that someone had already completed four days and you were sitting at two, you knew you had to get moving. Nobody wanted to fall behind, and nobody wanted to be the person who disappeared for the entire week and returned on Sunday with excuses.

The group made it harder to abandon the goals we had set for ourselves.

Your goal is harder to ignore when other people can see it

When you make a fitness goal on your own, you can change it whenever you feel like it. You can say you will exercise after work, skip it and decide that tomorrow is a better day. Nobody knows. There is no score to update and no group waiting for your workout video.

The Challengers 25 changed that. Our workouts were visible. If you said you were going to complete five days, everyone could see whether you had done it. Posting proof made the commitment feel real, and seeing other people post made it harder to pretend you had forgotten.

This is one reason accountability groups can work. Your decision is no longer happening privately. Other people know what you committed to, and their own progress gives you something to compare yours with.

A study involving 790 students compared exercise groups built around support, competition and a mix of both. Attendance was about 90% higher in the groups where people could compare their performance with others than in the groups without that comparison. The researchers found that social comparison had a stronger effect on attendance than support alone.

Sometimes, “You can do it” is helpful. Other times, seeing that your friend has already done it is what finally gets you off the couch.

Competition gives the workout some urgency

Most fitness goals do not have an immediate deadline. You want to get stronger, become more active or improve your health, but nothing terrible happens if you skip today. You can always tell yourself you will make up for it later.

A weekly challenge makes the deadline harder to ignore.

You have five workouts to complete before the week ends. If it is already Friday and you have only done two, you know exactly where you stand. You can also see where everyone else stands, which adds a little pressure.

That pressure was not always serious. A lot of it was jokes, teasing and refusing to let someone brag because they were one point ahead. But it still worked. The workout became part of an ongoing game between friends instead of another task you had to force yourself to do alone.

There is a psychological idea called the Köhler effect, which describes how people may work harder when they are part of a group and feel that their effort matters to the group’s result. In one study, participants who exercised as part of a team where their effort affected the team’s performance continued exercising longer than people who exercised alone.

We were not sitting in the Snapchat group discussing the Köhler effect, obviously. We just knew that it was harder to stop at day three when everyone else was trying to reach five.

The leaderboard made progress visible

The leaderboard was a big part of why the group worked.

It showed more than who exercised the most. It showed who was being consistent, who was catching up and who needed a reminder before the week ended. You could look at the scores and immediately know what was happening.

Without it, everyone’s workout videos would eventually disappear into the group chat. With it, each workout counted towards something we could all see.

Research on walking challenges has also found that competition can increase physical activity, especially when the people competing begin at similar activity levels. When the gap between participants becomes too wide, however, the person far behind may feel like there is no point trying to catch up.

That part matters. Friendly competition works when the challenge still feels possible. There is a difference between seeing someone one point ahead of you and seeing someone so far ahead that you have already accepted defeat.

The goal should not be to embarrass the person at the bottom. The leaderboard should give everyone a reason to do one more workout.

We were already using the app before it existed

The Challengers 25 worked, but we were running everything by hand.

Someone had to watch the group, count each person’s workout days, calculate the weekly scores and update the leaderboard. Workout proof was mixed in with every other conversation in the chat. If the person keeping score became busy, the leaderboard stopped moving.

Eventually, I started thinking about what it would look like if the group had an actual home.

What if the app counted each completed day automatically? What if everyone had a real streak? What if you could post photo or video proof without it getting lost in a busy group chat? What if the leaderboard updated itself instead of depending on one person? What if the app called you out when the day was almost over and you still had not logged a workout?

That is where Challengers the app came from.

I did not sit down and invent a random fitness problem to solve. My friends and I were already using accountability, proof, weekly scores and friendly competition to stay active. We had built the first version inside a Snapchat group. It worked until maintaining everything manually got old.

So I started building the app to give that accountability somewhere real to live.

The groups in Challengers come from The Original Challengers. The workout proof comes from the videos we posted after exercising. The weekly scores come from our five-days-a-week rule. The leaderboard comes from the one we maintained by hand. The reminders come from those moments when someone would enter the chat and ask why you had not worked out yet.

Each feature exists because it was already doing a job in the group.

It was never only about winning

Of course, we wanted to win. Nobody wants to spend the week watching their friends collect points while their own score sits at one out of five.

But the competition was not the whole point.

The real benefit was that we noticed each other’s effort. When someone worked out, the group saw it. When someone had not posted in a while, we noticed that too. Your friends gave you a reason to complete the workout on days when doing it for yourself did not feel like enough.

That is the kind of competition I want Challengers to create. Not the kind that makes you feel ashamed for having a bad week, but the kind that makes you think, “I cannot let these people beat me today,” put on your workout clothes and get moving.

Because sometimes you do not need a new workout plan or another motivational quote. You just need to see that your friend is already at four out of five while you are still sitting at two.