Does playing before matter? What repeat participation in Beat the Street tells us.

Beat the Street is a simple idea with big ambitions: to get people moving by turning towns into real-life games.  

Walk, wheel, or cycle past sensors called Beat Boxes to earn points for yourself and your team — while connecting with your community and boosting your health.  

But what happens when people come back and play again? Does taking part in one game affect how active you are in the next? And does it help you change your behaviour more effectively?

These are the questions we explored using data from Burnley, Lancashire, where Beat the Street ran in both 2023 and 2025.  

We wanted to understand the relationship between prior participation and two key outcomes:

• How active were people at the start of the 2025 game

• How much their activity levels changed over the course of the game.

We used two datasets: a large cross-sectional sample from 2025, which was matched with player IDs from 2023, and a smaller group of 2025 participants who had also played in 2023 and completed both the pre- and post-game surveys in 2025.  

This allowed us to explore how past participation related to both starting activity levels and behaviour change during the game.

Children who played before are likely to be more active now.

Children who had played before were significantly more likely to be physically active at the start of the 2025 game, suggesting that playing helps sustain healthier behaviours.

Adults who had played before were slightly more likely to be active, but the difference disappeared once demographics such as age, gender, deprivation, and ethnicity were taken into account.

The strongest and most consistent finding was that people who were less active at the start of the game were the most likely to improve, regardless of whether they’d played before.

New and returning players both benefit

These findings shed light on how community-wide interventions like Beat the Street can support both sustained activity and new behaviour change.  

Most importantly, the data shows that new players still benefit — especially those who start from low activity levels. This reinforces the value of Beat the Street in reaching and helping those most in need of support to become more active.

Looking forward

Repeat participation may help sustain activity over time — especially in younger populations. But interventions must continue to be accessible and engaging to newcomers.  

In Beat the Street, everyone has the opportunity to take a first step and, as it turns out, that’s the one that matters the most.