Can personality predict your exercise frequency?
Here’s why you might be struggling to make it to the gym…
It’s a bleak grey morning. Your alarm pierces your warm sleepy cocoon; you swat it lazily to make it snooze. Not today. Dragging yourself out of bed at 6am to squeeze in a pre-work gym session — to justify the eye-watering amount you optimistically invested in that shiny annual membership card — will have to wait for another day.
Does this sound familiar? Overestimating our exercise frequency (as gyms have craftily discovered) is all too common. A quick poll among my classmates suggests that most of us don’t achieve our ‘ideal’ exercise sessions per week. But the number of achieved weekly workouts still ranged widely (not even counting my own, somewhat extreme, training schedule 😂). So what makes some people exercise more than others? Is it motivation? Desire to achieve particular health benefits? Convenience of living close to a gym? Habit?
I’m sure all these play a role, but psychologists have recently suggested an interesting underlying factor: what if your personality can actually predict exercise frequency?
In fact, it can. Or to be more specific, one particular element of your personality can. That element is ‘planfulness’: the ability to develop plans in order to achieve your goals. From a study of almost 300 gym-goers, Ludwig et al (2019) found that people who scored higher on the ‘planfulness’ scale exercised on average 7 additional times per semester compared to those scoring lower.
I was curious to test this for myself — as you do, when you’re 1) studying for an MBA, 2) fresh out of your data analytics exam, and 3) still recovering from the intrusive barrage of ‘journey-to-your-inner-self’ personality tests that harshly announced the start of the course. Who better to test this on than my new MBA colleagues? Of course, my sample was nowhere near as large as the original, and I didn’t have access to the same planfulness scale test, but I did have a pool of people who already knew their scores on the Big Five personality profile (and were nice enough to fill in a 2 minute survey for me). In particular, I wanted to see whether the results would be significant among a group of people with already higher-than-average conscientiousness (and access to the free university gym).
So what did I find? I tested a range of different personality traits related to conscientiousness — self-belief, orderliness, dutifulness, achievement striving, self discipline, and planning (note ‘planning’ here is more about thinking through possibilities before acting, whereas ‘orderliness’ is more similar to the ‘planfulness’ factor mentioned before). And sure enough, I found orderliness — the tendency to plan, create routines, stick to schedules — to be significant in predicting exercise frequency. People with one point higher orderliness exercised almost once more per week than those with lower scores. And yes, data buffs: this relationship was statistically significant (though I’ll still heavily caveat the small sample size).
Why might this be the case? Well, I also asked people what their biggest barriers were to exercising as much as they’d like, and here’s a pretty word cloud illustrating what they said:
What stands out? Time. Overwhelmingly, people cite lack of time for the reason they don’t exercise more. It makes sense that people who are highly organised may be better able to plan and schedule workouts in a busy week, while those who rely on finding the time more spontaneously may just never find that time.
Now, I’m not going to talk for ages about particular strategies for cramming exercise into a hectic lifestyle (cue link to a previous post on this very topic!) What I’m more interested in is the underlying question: can you actually change your personality and become more orderly?
Research shows that it is possible to deliberately change certain personality traits, by setting goals and investing long-term effort. We can also develop particular characteristics if they are required by a job or task we are committed to, and we typically do become more conscientious and organised as we get older (read more here).
So there we have it: if these results are right, organisation is vital to maintaining our ideal exercise frequency when faced with a busy lifestyle. If you’re not a naturally orderly person, don’t despair — you can intentionally make yourself more organised. But let’s also not forget that my mini study found orderliness only explained around half the variation in exercise frequency. As we saw in the word cloud, there are a whole host of other factors that influence how often you exercise, and it will likely be different for each of us. What are your personal barriers?
