Making exercise fun is the holy grail for many people who can’t find motivation to exercise.
However, a study published in the Journal Frontiers of Psychology found that, rather than enjoying running or once-attended gym classes, the solution may be easier.
This is because people with different personality traits enjoy different types of exercise, the study found.
For example, more extroverts prefer high-intensity training sessions with others, such as team sports, while those who score highly on “neurism” are metrics that measure someone’s emotional instability, prefer private training without people looking at them, separated by short breaks.
Regarding those who scored very well on conscience, “I was likely to have a balanced fitness…and I think it’s most likely based on the fact that exercise is good for them.”
“Personality determines the intensity and form of the exercise we are attracted to. …If we understand that, we can create that first step in sedentary individual engagement and exercise,” she told CNN.
Research shows that these findings have important implications for more people to encourage exercise, especially as only 22.5% of adolescents around the world and the World Health Organization recommend 150 minutes of physical activity per week.
By focusing on the type of personality, healthcare providers may be able to offer a “more personalized approach to movement.”
“Usually… we tell people to exercise and “You should do that because you know that high-intensity interval training is good for you,” she said.
“But for people with high neuroticism, they’re not going to do that. They also know that low-intensity exercise is beneficial. People are more likely to engage in it when they know that someone is highly neurotic and that they are recommending that kind of exercise.”
It is also important to note that personality traits interact with each other, Ronka added. Some people score very high in both neuroticism and conscience. This means that while you may find exercise anxiety-inducing, they are much more likely to do it because they know it’s good for them, she said.
To reach their findings, Ronka and her colleagues in London first overseen 132 study participants, ages 25 to 51, and completed a questionnaire revealing their personality traits.
This study adopted a commonly used model that conceptualizes someone’s personality through five traits: extroversion, neuroticism, consent, openness, and conscience.
“Personality traits… they’re just an explanation of how people behave in certain situations,” Paul Burgess, a professor of neuroscience at UCL who co-led the research, told CNN.
“And how people behave in certain situations is largely determined by their brain capabilities, what they notice, what they pay attention to, what they remember, how quickly they respond.”
The researchers then ran fitness tests on participants and randomly sorted them into two groups. The control group was given an 8-week cycling and strength plan I did a 10-minute stretch exercise a week. Of the original 132 participants, 86 completed both sides and posttests for these 8 weeks.
The research team found that fitness was improved for all personality types for those who completed the cycling and strength program, but there were significant differences in exercise fun. More extroverts enjoyed higher intensity lab fitness tests, while more “neurotic” people enjoyed at-home-based light intensity sessions.
Personality traits informed how exercise influenced someone’s stress level. People with highly scored neurotic disorders were far more than any other group, significantly reducing self-reported stress, the study found.
“The people who benefit most from stress reduction are those who have actually shown a reduction in stress after the last eight weeks of exercise,” Ronka said. “And I think that’s a very strong message.”
Given the many benefits of exercise, including stress reduction, both Ronka and Burgess hope that their findings encourage people to find alternative exercise methods outside of traditional training that people dislike.
“Perhaps there’s a risk of serious involvement with competitive sports when the focus is … when young people are beginning to demand more from them,” Burgess said.
“There are a lot of personalities that don’t respond well to such situations, and I find it extremely stressful.”
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