Matching your workouts to your personality could make exercise more enjoyable and give better results

CNN Making exercise fun is the holy grail for a multitude of people who can t quite find the motivation to work out But rather than forcing yourself to enjoy running or that gym class you once attended the fix may lie in something more straightforward merely matching a workout to your personality type according to a review published Tuesday in the journal Frontiers in Psychology That s because people with different personality traits enjoy different types of exercise the review determined More extroverted people for example prefer high-intensity training sessions with others such as squad sports while people who scored highly on neuroticism a metric that measures someone s emotional instability preferred private workouts without people watching them and punctuated by short breaks As for those who scored highly on conscientiousness they were more likely to have a well-rounded fitness and we think that s because conscientious individuals are more likely to be driven by the fact that exercise is good for them commented the research s co-lead author Flaminia Ronca an associate professor in exercise science at University College London Personality determines which intensities and forms of exercises we re attracted to If we can understand that then we can make that first step in engagement and exercise in sedentary individuals she reported CNN These findings have central implications for encouraging more people to exercise especially since just of adults and of adolescents worldwide manage the World Vitality Organization-recommended minutes of physical activity per week according to the scrutiny By focusing on personality types healthcare care providers may be able to offer a more personalized approach to exercise declared Angelina Sutin a professor at Florida State University who specializes in scrutinizing links between personality and strength and who wasn t involved in the analysis Typically we tell people to exercise and just say We know high-intensity interval training is good for you so you should do it she announced But for people high in neuroticism they re not going to do it and we also know that low-intensity exercise can be beneficial too Knowing that somebody is high in neuroticism recommending that kind of exercise maybe people will be more likely to engage in it It is also fundamental to note that personality traits interact with each other Ronca added Several people outcome highly on both neuroticism and conscientiousness meaning that although they may find exercise anxiety-inducing they are much more likely to do it since they know it is good for them she commented To reach their findings Ronca and her colleagues in London first directed the analysis participants aged between and years old to complete a questionnaire revealing their personality traits The research employed a commonly used model that conceptualizes someone s personality through five traits extroversion neuroticism agreeableness openness and conscientiousness Personality traits they re just descriptions of the way people behave in certain situations Paul Burgess a professor of neuroscience at UCL who co-led the scrutiny communicated CNN And the way that people behave in certain situations is determined to a large degree by their brain capabilities what they notice what they pay attention to what they can remember how fast they can react The researchers then ran fitness tests on the participants and randomly sorted them into two groups One group was given an eight-week cycling and strength plan while the control group did minutes a week of stretching exercises Of the original participants completed both pre- and post-testing either side of these eight weeks The examination crew ascertained that although fitness improved across all personality types for those who completed the cycling and strength campaign there was a marked difference in enjoyment of the exercises More extroverted people enjoyed the higher-intensity lab fitness tests while more neurotic people enjoyed the home-based light-intensity sessions Personality traits also informed how exercise influenced someone s stress levels People who scored highly in neuroticism had a notable reduction in self-reported stress much more than in any other group the assessment revealed Those who would benefit the the greater part from a stress reduction are the ones who definitely manifested a decrease in stress following those eight weeks of exercise Ronca commented And I think that s quite a powerful message to give Given the multiple benefits of exercise including stress reduction both Ronca and Burgess hope their findings encourage people to find alternative strategies of exercise outside the more traditional workouts they might dislike There s a danger perhaps that the focus becomes competitive sports and serious engagement at a time when young people are starting to have lots more demands on them Burgess mentioned There are a lot of personalities that don t respond well to that kind of situation that find it quite stressful