Hate exercising? Factoring in your personality type could help

Finding your preferred mode of exercise is an important barrier to overcome. Photo / 123rf

Extroverts tend to enjoy higher-intensity training while people who score high for neuroticism are likely to enjoy independent exercise programmes, a study found.

Having trouble making exercise fun? Try matching your workouts to your personality, according to a new study, which found that such traits are reliable predictors of the type and intensity of exercise people enjoy.

The peer-reviewed study, published earlier this month in Frontiers in Psychology, found that extroverts tend to enjoy higher-intensity training, while conscientious people are likelier to engage in longer hours of regular physical activity. And people who scored high for “neuroticism” on a pre-study questionnaire – which the authors associate with emotional instability – are likely to enjoy private and independent exercise programmes.

The results show the potential value of monitoring personality traits in exercise studies and could aid “the design of training programmes tailored to participant’s needs,” wrote the authors, from University College London.

Nearly a third of the world’s adult population is physically inactive, meaning they do not meet the recommendation of at least 150 minutes of exercise per week, according to studies cited by the World Health Organisation.

“There’s an adage in the industry saying that ‘the best exercise is the one you will do,’ implying the importance of personal preference,” said Luigi Bercades, a senior lecturer in sport and exercise science at New Zealand’s Auckland University of Technology, who wasn’t involved in the study.

“Therefore, finding someone’s preferred mode of exercise is one important barrier to overcome,” he said in an email. “The study reinforces these concepts.”

The initial 132 participants in the University College London study filled out questionnaires to assess stress levels and personality traits. They then attended lab sessions to measure basic fitness levels before being assigned to two groups.

The first group was asked to go through a home-based, eight-week cycling and strength-training plan. The second group was asked to maintain their normal lifestyles to serve as the control group. In the end, 86 people completed the tests. Dropouts were because of injury, illness or loss of contact.

A key finding was that exercise programmes may benefit specific personalities in different ways, the authors said.

People who had high neuroticism scores were most likely to experience the highest levels of stress reduction through exercise. They were also likelier to prefer lighter exercise sessions that didn’t require a lengthy, sustained effort.

Those associated with conscientiousness were the only group that did not have a preference for a particular exercise, possibly because they are likely to be motivated to exercise for health-protective purposes.

Bercades advised that people shouldn’t get fixated on figuring out their personality types before trying to find the best exercise programme.

“What’s more important is for people to try out different sorts of physical activity until they find something they prefer and can adhere to,” he said. That way, “they can better choose the ‘best exercise’ for themselves”.

Grant Tomkinson, a professor of human movement and exercise and sports science at the University of South Australia, said in an email that enjoyable exercises are beneficial in that people are likely to continue to do them over the long run.

“And people should play the long game when it comes to exercise,” he said, using a comparison to a retirement plan – where the more you do “earlier in life, the more you’ll be able to do (or have) later in life”.