PSA: With effect from 1 April 2022, Healthpoints are no longer awarded in milestones of 750/1500. They are awarded immediately upon hitting the daily milestones for steps and MVPA.
Disclaimer: This is not a sponsored post.
If there’s anything you know about me for a fact, it’s probably this: I love free money.
Even if it’s a small amount, if it can be earned with little or passive effort, I’m all for it, because why not?
With the National Steps Challenge, you can earn free money in just a few steps (pun definitely intended).
The National Steps Challenge is a Health Promotion Board (HPB) initiative to encourage Singaporeans to stay active.
By clocking steps or minutes spent performing Moderate to Vigorous Physical Activities (MVPA), users can earn Healthpoints, which can be redeemed for cash vouchers.
Getting Started
You can get started with just your smartphone. Having a wearable fitness tracker (ie smartwatch or Fitbit-like watch) is optional but recommended.
First, you’ll need to download the Healthy 365 mobile app from your phone’s app store, create an account, and log in.
Then, connect the fitness tracker of your choice to the app.
You can connect your wearable fitness tracker or your phone’s default health tracking app – this will be sufficient for tracking steps.
Next, navigate to ‘Challenges’ > ‘National Steps Challenge’ to join the National Steps Challenge – you are not entered in the challenge by default.
Now, you’re ready to start earning Healthpoints.
Earning Healthpoints
There are 2 ways to earn Healthpoints in the National Steps Challenge – via steps and MVPA.
Earning Healthpoints is capped at 40 points/day/method, so you can earn a maximum of 80 Healthpoints/day.
For steps and MVPA, Healthpoints are earned in tiers according to the table below:
| Healthpoints | 10 points | 15 points | 15 points |
| Steps | 5,000 steps | 7,500 steps | 10,000 steps |
| MVPA | 10 mins | 20 mins | 30 mins |
This means that to earn Healthpoints by clocking steps, you need to hit a minimum of 5,000 steps, which earns 10 Healthpoints.
Clocking 10,000 steps will earn a total of 40 Healthpoints, and so on.
If you don’t have a wearable fitness tracker, the only way to earn Healthpoints is via steps.
This is because you need a wearable fitness tracker in order to track your heart rate when you exercise.
If you don’t feel like spending money on a fitness tracker, HPB actually gives out their own fitness trackers for free.
You just need to make an appointment to collect your fitness tracker via the Healthy 365 app.
Redeeming Healthpoints
After collecting Healthpoints, you can redeem them for cash vouchers.
The exchange rate is 750 Healthpoints = $5.
You can do this via the rewards catalogue on the Healthy 365 app which features vouchers for a variety of merchants including Cold Storage, Koi, Polar, and more.
But in my experience, there’s no need to commit to a particular merchant to redeem vouchers.
Instead, you can simply choose to redeem the generic HPB voucher, which should be usable at any of the merchants in their catalogue anyway.
Take note that these vouchers do expire, so you don’t want to redeem them until you know you’re going to use them.
To summarise,
Redeeming vouchers with the National Steps Challenge isn’t going to significantly offset your expenses, and you aren’t going to earn a lot from it.
But what’s nice about it is as you go about your day and clock steps, or whenever you work out, you get to earn a small bit of moolah.
You can earn Healthpoints from things that you’re already doing on a daily basis anyway, which makes it arguably passive, so why not?
And if it motivates you to exercise more or be more active than you otherwise would be, that’s even better.