If - just two months into the year - you've already abandoned your fitness resolution, a common mindset could be responsible. But effective strategies are available to overcome it.
Image: Getty Images / Organic Media
Gretchen Reynolds
By now, a hefty percentage of us have given up on our latest exercise resolutions, and may be berating ourselves and wondering why. Why didn’t we stick with those workouts, when we sincerely meant to, planned to, wanted to?
An important new study of exercise motivation offers some potential answers and gentle reassurance. Published in BMC Public Health, the research found that a common mindset about exercise, known as “all-or-nothing thinking”, often undermines our best efforts to be active.
The study, the first to systematically examine all-or-nothing thinking in relation to exercise, “may help people understand” why we so frequently abandon our New Year’s exercise resolutions, said lead author Michelle Segar, a behavioural scientist at the University of Michigan.
But the findings also provide encouragement, she said. The researchers not only identified typical symptoms of all-or-nothing exercise thinking, but also developed strategies that could help even the most reluctant or intermittent exercisers to start building lasting workout routines.
Sticking with exercise is hard - and rare. About half of all people who start a new exercise programme quit within a few months, Segar said, and many within weeks, no matter how determined they were at the start.
It’s easy to come up with reasons to skip exercise, as almost all of us know from experience. In surveys, people typically cite lack of time, insufficient access to facilities, equipment or expertise, and other obstacles.
But Segar, a fitness coach as well as an academic researcher, noticed another frequent rationale among her clients. “They had this idea that if they couldn’t match some idealised goal” about exercise, she said, “it wasn’t worth doing anything.”
This mindset is known as all-or-nothing thinking and, in essence, means you create an ambitious target and allow yourself no wiggle room to fall even a little short. Instead, you scrap the programme.
All-or-nothing thinking has long been recognised and studied in weight loss and nutrition, Segar said, when people make unyielding plans for how much and what they’ll allow themselves to eat. Then they sneak half a doughnut and, having failed in their eyes to stick with the blueprint, eat the rest of the doughnut and give up on the dietary project altogether.
But researchers hadn’t looked into the extent to which all-or-nothing thinking might be keeping people from exercising.
So for the new study, Segar and her colleagues advertised around the university and nearby community for men and women who had wanted to work out and tried to work out, but didn’t stick with it.
They wound up with 27 adults aged 19 to 79 who self-identified as lapsed exercisers.
The researchers set up focus groups, asking these volunteers to discuss their exercise histories, expectations, concerns and, in particular, what they felt had led them to stop exercising, often repeatedly.
The researchers didn’t mention all-or-nothing thinking or otherwise guide the volunteers toward particular answers, Segar said.
But without prompting, the topic popped up over and over. “People would say things like, ‘I could only work out for 15 minutes, and that doesn’t count,’” Segar said. Or they told the researchers they knew exercise should hurt, and since theirs didn’t, it couldn’t be actual exercise and wasn’t worth continuing.
After closely analysing these discussions, Segar and her co-authors teased out several lines of thinking that frequently recurred and, they felt, formed the basis of all-or-nothing thinking about exercise.
Most important, people tended to set very rigid criteria for what counts as exercise. They had heard from friends, trainers, influencers or the media (yes, mea culpa) that exercise should last for, say, at least 30 minutes or an hour, or be extremely strenuous and/or unpleasant. Anything less - a brief walk or a few minutes of calisthenics or a gentle swim - wasn’t exercise and therefore wasn’t worth the bother.
Many also admitted readily bumping workouts off their calendars. “When your routine ends up getting crowded,” one volunteer said in a session, exercise becomes “an easy thing to push to the side.”
But at the same time, most “were baffled” about why they didn’t continue to exercise, Segar said. All-or-nothing thinking tended to be barely conscious. They didn’t say to themselves, “Since I can’t run for an hour, I’ll just stay home.” But that mindset “did guide behavior,” she said. It gave people an out. It also left them feeling guilty and confused.
Listening to the participants’ laments about their relationship to exercise, Segar and her colleagues decided in the study to outline strategies people might use to subvert all-or-nothing thinking.
1. “The biggest is to choose ‘good enough’ over perfect,” Segar said. A wealth of existing exercise science shows even a few minutes a day of relatively easy activity, such as walking up the stairs or around the block, can appreciably improve health. You don’t have to run. You don’t have to keep moving for hours. “It’s not a cliché,” Segar said. “Every little bit counts. Do what you can today” and allow yourself the grace to accept that “for now, that’s good enough”.
2. Don’t judge yourself by your fitness from years ago. “A lot of people are prisoners to their exercise past,” Segar said. Could you once run an eight-minute mile? That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t walk a 20-minute mile now. Accept where you are.
3. Don’t blame yourself for not sticking rigidly with your plans. So much messaging about exercise involves complex formulas and recommendations that few of us, in real life, will understand or meet, Segar said. So, readjust your ideals of exercise. Walk around the office while you take a phone call. Do a few wall push-ups if you can’t make it to the gym. It’s all good enough.
The study has clear limitations. It’s small, involved people from one community, and relied solely on their recall and honesty about their exercise experiences.
But it does open an interesting perspective on a rarely discussed obstacle to becoming and remaining active.
“These findings represent the initial steps toward addressing the psychological barriers that impede regular physical activity with those who are all-or-nothing thinkers,” said Len Kravitz, a professor of exercise science at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He researches exercise motivation but was not part of the new study.
Segar said she and her colleagues expect to publish more and larger studies about all-or-nothing exercise thinking later this year. In the meantime, the study’s lesson is that our aim with exercise should be to fit in what we can, when we can, whether that approach feels ideal or not. “There are an infinite number of ways to be physically active,” Segar said, and at this instant any of them can be good enough.