Finding the motivation to exercise can be the biggest challenge when working out. This could be one of the reasons why less than a quarter of people meet the World Health Organization’s recommended exercise goals. The key to sticking with and benefiting from exercise in the long term could simply lie in doing something you enjoy, say the authors of a new study from UCL. Previous research has shown that the personalities of people who play different organized sports tend to be different. What is less clear, however, is how personality influences the type of sporting activity people actually enjoy doing.
How People With Certain Personality Traits Benefit More from Certain Forms of Exercise Than Others
The new study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, looked at whether individual personality traits correlated with enjoyment of different types of exercise, whether participants followed a prescribed exercise program and how this affected their fitness. The study found several correlations between the type of exercise and personality traits, including the preference of extroverted people for high-intensity exercise and the preference of people with neurotic traits – who tend to brood – for short, intense workouts rather than longer workouts.
Dr. Flaminia Ronca, lead author of the study from UCL Surgery & Interventional Science and the Institute of Sport, Exercise and Health (ISEH), said: “We know that the world’s population is becoming increasingly sedentary. We often hear of people trying to become more active but struggling to make lasting changes. In this study, we wanted to understand how personality can influence this to help develop effective health behavior change interventions.” The researchers found some clear links between personality traits and the type of exercise that participants enjoyed the most. “Our brains are wired differently, which influences our behavior and how we interact with our environment,” Ronca explained. “So it’s not surprising that personality also influences how we respond to different intensities of exercise.”
Big 5 Model and the Joy of Exercise
For the study, the team studied 132 volunteers from the general population with different fitness levels and backgrounds who were assigned to either an eight-week cycling and strength training program (intervention group) or a resting control group. At the beginning of the program, the participants’ baseline fitness was determined. Strength was tested using push-ups, planks to exhaustion and countermovement jumps (jumping back up immediately after landing). This was followed by a 30-minute low-intensity bike ride and, after a short break, a cycling test to measure maximum oxygen uptake (V̇O2max test ).
The team also assessed perceived stress on a scale of 1 to 10 and personality traits using the Big 5 model, a common personality test in the field of sport and exercise psychology. The Big 5 model groups people according to whether their dominant trait is extroversion, agreeableness (refers to characteristics such as willingness to cooperate, trust, compassion and consideration for others), conscientiousness, neuroticism (measures emotional stability and tendency towards negative emotions such as anxiety, mood swings or irritability) or openness. During the training program, participants were asked to rate their enjoyment of each training session before their fitness was tested again at the end of the program. Of the 132 participants, 86 completed the program, and all of these participants became fitter and stronger, regardless of their personality.
While not all personality traits had an impact on enjoyment of exercise, several correlations were discovered during the study. Extroverts tended to particularly enjoy high-intensity exercise such as high-intensity interval training (HIIT) and a maximum-intensity fitness test on a bike. Individuals with a strong neurotic personality participated well in the exercise program, but preferred short intense sessions over longer ones. They also preferred not to be monitored, for example by not recording their heart rate during the program, suggesting that these individuals may value having freedom for independence and privacy when exercising.
The conscientious individuals tended to have a balanced fitness level, i.e. they tended to achieve better results in both aerobic fitness and core strength and were generally more physically active. However, conscientiousness was not a predictor of greater enjoyment of a particular sport. The authors suggest that this may be because conscientious individuals are more motivated by the health benefits of physical activity than the enjoyment of it, suggesting that adherence to the program has less to do with enjoyment and more to do with it “being good for them”.
The Influence of Personality and Exercise on Stress
At the beginning of the study, the stress levels of the intervention group and the control group were similar. However, the only group that showed a significant reduction in stress levels after the training was the one that scored high on the neuroticism trait. Professor Paul Burgess, one of the authors of the study from the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, said: “We found that people who scored higher on the personality trait neuroticism showed a particularly strong reduction in stress when they undertook the fitness training recommended in the study. This suggests that people with this trait may particularly benefit from stress reduction.” The researchers concluded that the most important thing people can do to improve their activity levels is to find an activity they enjoy so that they are more likely to stick with it.