5 easy energisers for design sprints

Hands up if you’ve been in a long meeting or workshop where you’ve been losing the will to live and desperately needed energy? I can guess maybe a few of you have? If not, you must be a superhuman. It doesn’t matter how engaged we are in something, sometimes we need to do something fun to get us energised so we can focus more on tasks ahead.

At Common Good, we’ve been experimenting with energisers to keep us going when we’re doing weekly design sprints, long workshops or just feel like we need 5 minutes of weirdness. We’ve tested lots and we’ve definitely found our favourites so far... We’ve also started to introduce these into client workshops as well.

The 5 below are current favourites (they tend to work better with some upbeat music on too). This is one of our playlists:

1. Shakey

This is really simple but you’ll be surprised how energised you feel after!

a) Start moving one shoulder up & down, wriggle it around, you might feel some creeks. Do this for a good 20 seconds, then do the other shoulder, just that one up & down. Then when you’ve done another 20 seconds of that, move both up & down at the same time.

b) Then shake one arm for 20 secs, then the other, then both at the same time.

c) Then shake one leg for 20 secs, then the other, then both at the same time (requires some balance/jumping!)

c) Then shake everything at the same time and jump around like a crazy person!

2. Duck duck goose

Some of you may have played this when you were little. Turns out its a great energiser! Be warned it can end up with skidding across the floor and potential chaos… so make sure you have plenty of room.

a) Sit down in a circle facing each other. One person is the leader and walks around the circle. As they walk around, they tap people’s heads and say whether they are a ‘duck’ or a ‘goose’.

b) Once someone is the goose they get up and try to chase the leader around the circle. The goal is to tap that person before they are able sit down in the goose’s spot. If the goose is not able to do this, they become the leader for the next round and play continues.

c) If they do tap the leader, the person tagged has to sit in the centre of the circle. Then the goose becomes the leader for the next round. The person in the middle can’t leave until another person is tagged and they are replaced.

3. Dance moves

You’ll definitely need a good playlist for this one.

a) The leader plays a track from the playlist.

b) One person in the group starts doing a dance move (this could be waving your hands in the air for example). Everyone else copies that dance move.

c) The leader then plays a different track. And another person starts doing a dance move and everyone copies.

d) Do this until everyone has completed a dance move. We quite like putting on summery dance tracks to lighten the mood but you could do this to anything you fancy.

4. Fruit bowl

This one is totally borrowed from our friends over at Hyper Island and is SO good. It’s similar to Duck Duck Goose in the energy and competition it creates.

a) Everyone sits in a circle on chairs with one person leading in the middle.

b) The person in the middle comes up with 3 fruits e.g. Apple, Banana, Orange. The leader then assigns each person a fruit.

c) The person in the middle then shouts one of the fruits out: ORANGE! Then all of the oranges have to switch chairs. The person in the middle has to try and steal one of the empty chairs. If they steal a chair then the person left without the chair is now in the middle.

d) They then shout out BANANA! And so on…

e) Another important rule not to forget is the person in the middle can also shout FRUIT BOWL and everyone has to switch chairs.

f) We tend to play this for 4–5 mins. It gets you pretty exhausted, doubling as good exercise!

5. Yoga moves

This one was great for when we took some time away from the studio on our Away Days (you can read more about them here).

I won’t explain this step by step as it simply involved some yoga sequence energisers to wake up our bodies. We mixed these up a bit as we didn’t have yoga mats so we mainly did the standing sequences. Have a look online for some easy yoga sequences!

We’re always trailing out new energisers and exercises. We trialled a trust exercise last week which actually worked quite well at energising us during a day in the design sprint. Let us know if there are any more we should be trying.