Category Archives: Money

I am a member of Discovery Vitality Active Rewards program which encourage exercise through exercise.  Each week, which run from Saturday till the following Friday, a points goal needs to be achieved for certain benefits and awards needs to be obtained.  For example, 100 points gets allocated for taking more than 10000 steps.

However the points allocated are highly scewed towards gym exercise, running or cycling and totally discriminates against hikers.  I am going to use a hike I did past Saturday, 21 May 2016 to explain my point.

I hiked for 23.27km in the Kogelberg Nature Reserve over rugged terrain and up and down mountains carrying a daypack with water and food for the day.  I use Runkeeper to track the hike and here is a screenshot of the hike with the details:

Here is the splits per km:

and below is a Google Map which show the terrain that was hiked.

With Samsung SHealth app I also tracked my steps (37000+ steps) for the hike (This is from Discovery site and as reported to Discovery):

and here is what Discovery allocated to me for the hike (100 points):

So Discovery have awarded me with 100 points for a 23.27km hike that took 5 hours and 25 min of actual hiking with over 37000 steps taken.  The total time with breaks was 7 hours and 30 min.  Am I the only one that think this is discrimitarry when 90 min in a gym will get you 300 point and a hour run will also give you the 300 points. Even a short Parkrun will get you 300 point. If I spend 5 hours plus running or in the gym or cycling then I would get much much more points.  And please do not tell me that hiking in the mountain at an average pace of 4.3 km/hour for over 5 hours is not as strenuous as gym or running. This just does not make any sense??

Me being an active hiker and the way I do my exercise will never get more than 100 points for a hike irrespective of the distance or the difficulty and most hikes are strenuous and difficult. My current weekly goal is 600 points and since I will never get more than 100 points per day, it is almost becoming impossible to reach my goal so why should I even bother to take part in the program.  I will however not stop hiking.

Would like to hear the views of others so please comment below.  If anybody from Discovery reads this, then I would really appreciate a comment.

Happy hiking and exercise.