Scientists have shown that people with certain personality traits may benefit from certain workouts more than others and that some people may particularly profit from the stress-relieving effects of exercise. This adds to a growing body of research looking at exercise outcomes and individual people.
In other words, this is about matching workouts to your personality. As a general finding, extroverts thrive in high-energy group sports, neurotics prefer private bursts with breaks, and everyone sees stress levels drop when they find exercise they enjoy.
According to the lead researcher, Dr Flaminia Ronca, from University College London’s (UCL) Institute of Sport, Exercise and Health: “We found that our personality can influence how we engage with exercise, and particularly which forms of exercise we enjoy the most.”
Ronca and her team found that understanding personality factors in designing and recommending physical activity programmes is likely to be very important in determining how successful a program is, and whether people will stick with it and become fitter.
To demonstrate this, Ronca recruited participants that attended lab testing for baseline fitness. She then split them into two groups:
The first group was provided with an eight-week home-based fitness plan made up of cycling and strength training (intervention group).
The second group continued their usual lifestyle (control group).
During lab testing, the first intervention week, and after the intervention, all participants completed a questionnaire on how much they’d enjoyed each training session. The personality traits examined in the study included extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, and openness.
Before the intervention, the stress levels of both groups were similar. After the intervention, however, people who scored high in neuroticism showed a strong reduction in stress.
This highlights that those who benefit the most from a reduction in stress respond very well to exercise.
Ronca adds: “Our brains are wired in different ways, which drives our behaviours and how we interact with our environment. So it’s not surprising that personality would also influence how we respond to different intensities of exercise.”
Personality types and optimal workouts
Those scoring high on extraversion enjoyed high intensity sessions with others around, including team sports.
People scoring high on neuroticism preferred private workouts.
Those scoring high on consciousness were found to engage in exercise regardless of whether they particularly enjoyed it or were driven by curiosity, respectively.
Agreeable people like to work out for a while but prefer lower-intensity exercise.
Open people are willing to try different workouts regardless of how curious they are about them, and rate strenuous and higher-intensity workouts lower than other groups.
The research appears in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, titled “Personality traits can predict which exercise intensities we enjoy most, and the magnitude of stress reduction experienced following a training program.”
