Some people enjoy exercising, and some people would do anything to avoid it. But is it possible to improve your experience of exercise, whether you love it or hate it? A new study says yes, that is, if you select your workouts to suit your personality traits.
Published in Frontiers in Psychology, the study shows that people with particular personalities tend to enjoy and engage with particular types of exercise over others, sticking to them and benefiting from them more than other workouts.
“We found some clear links between personality traits and the type of exercise the participants enjoyed most,” said Flaminia Ronca, a study author and an associate professor at University College London, according to a press release. “We could potentially use this knowledge to tailor physical activity recommendations to the individual — and hopefully help them to become and remain more active.”
Read More: Understanding the “Big Five” Personality Traits
Improving the Exercise Experience
Recent research suggests that people’s personalities are associated with their attitudes and approaches to health, as well as their enjoyment of exercise. Focusing on the “Big Five” personality traits — including extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness, and neuroticism — that are most studied in personality psychology, this work typically finds that people with high levels of extraversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness are especially likely to enjoy, or at least engage, in exercise.
But exercise is important, whether we have the personalities that encourage us to enjoy it or not. So, to untangle the ties between our personalities and our exercise enjoyment and engagement, a team of researchers turned to a pool of 132 participants from all fitness levels and abilities.
After finishing a personality assessment, a stress assessment, a fitness test, and a series of exercise sessions in the lab, 78 of these participants were asked to complete an at-home fitness plan, including cycling and strength training, while 54 were asked to follow their typical fitness plan, whether those plans included workouts or not.
Continuing those fitness courses over a period of 8 weeks, the participants were also asked to report how much they enjoyed their workouts, first after their exercise sessions in the lab, then after their first and final weeks of their fitness plans.
“You often hear about people trying to become more active but struggling to make lasting changes,” Ronca said in the release. “In this study, we wanted to understand how personality can influence this to support the development of effective interventions for changes in health behavior.”
The Highs and Lows of Personality and Exercise
In total, 86 participants stuck with the program, and their responses revealed that participants with high levels of extraversion preferred longer, higher-intensity exercise (and workouts with other people around), while participants with high levels of neuroticism preferred shorter, higher-intensity exercise and lower-intensity exercise (and workouts without anyone there to watch them).
The responses also indicated that the traits of contentiousness and agreeableness had no particular association with a particular type of exercise (though people with the former trait tended to engage in workouts whether they enjoyed them or not), while participants who scored high on openness enjoyed lower-intensity activity.
“Our brains are wired in different ways, which drives our behaviors,” Ronca said in a second press release. “So, it’s not surprising that personality would also influence how we respond to different intensities of exercise.”
Read More: Is 30 Minutes of Exercise a Day Enough?
Stress-Relieving Responses
Intriguingly, participants with certain personality traits were also more likely to respond to the stress-relieving effects of exercise. Among those who followed the at-home fitness plan, participants with higher levels of neuroticism — a trait often characterized by anxiety, irritability, and instability — reported an especially strong reduction in stress.
“It’s fantastic news,” Ronca said in the second release, “that those who benefit the most from a reduction in stress respond very well to exercise.”
According to the researchers, the results stress that the trick to enjoying and engaging with exercise is to find the workouts that excite you most. “It’s okay if we don’t enjoy a particular session,” Ronca said in the second release. “We can try something else.”
This article is not offering medical advice and should be used for informational purposes only.
Read More: It Doesn't Matter What Time You Exercise As Long As You Get Moving
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
Frontiers in Psychology. Personality Traits Can Predict Which Exercise Intensities We Enjoy Most, and the Magnitude of Stress Reduction Experienced Following a Training Program
Journal of Research in Personality. Associations Among the Big Five, Health Values, and Health Behaviors
Psychology of Sport and Exercise. Personality Traits Moderate the Relationships Between Psychological Needs and Enjoyment of Physical Activity
Sam Walters is a journalist covering archaeology, paleontology, ecology, and evolution for Discover, along with an assortment of other topics. Before joining the Discover team as an assistant editor in 2022, Sam studied journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
