Sport is in our blood at GoJoe.
We started as a group of ordinary joes competing on an athletics track. Our co-founding team spent years working at the British Olympic Team (Team GB). We’re backed by world-class athletes - from Premier League footballers to double Olympic gold medallists - and we partner with leading institutions including Stanford University. Performance, fairness and integrity matter to us.
So when it came to building our weighted points system, we treated it seriously.
The starting point wasn’t opinion - it was science and data. Our data engineering team analysed each activity type and worked out the average calories burned per second. That gave us a scientific baseline to compare activities properly. A minute of HIIT is not physiologically the same as a minute of walking, and the system needed to reflect that.
From there, we built relative weightings so that different activities could compete on a level playing field. The aim wasn’t to favour intensity or punish lower-impact movement. It was to fairly translate effort across 65+ activity types into a single, simple points system.
But calorie data alone doesn’t tell the whole story.
We pressure-tested the model through focus groups, research and pilots including with Stanford, input from Olympians and elite performers, and - most importantly - feedback from our community of joes.
In some cases we adjusted weightings. In others we introduced caps. These refinements help maintain balance and prevent extreme outliers from distorting competition.
No virtual activity app will ever be perfect unless you follow people around and hook them up to lab equipment. And GoJoe is ultimately designed to be motivating and enjoyable. But we’ve invested significant time and expertise to make the system as fair and robust as possible - and the feedback we receive reflects that.
If you’d like to explore the full activity weightings, you can view them here:
And if you’re interested in the broader framework that underpins fairness across the platform, you can read more about our wider integrity measures here:
👉🏻What's to stop people cheating on GoJoe?
As always, the system continues to evolve - and the community helps shape it.