For those who imagine that (contrary to all the existing evidence) humans behave rationally, exercise presents a riddle. Surveys indicate that nearly everyone understands the benefits of exercise; and yet objective studies using accelerometers find that as few as 3.2 percent of adults get the recommended amount of exercise. Why don’t people do what they know is good for them?
One idea, championed by bike workouts to support your running training, is that most people don’t find exercise pleasant. This may not sound like an earth-shattering idea, but it’s not something that policy-makers talk about much.
It’s taken for granted that, if you’re out of shape, exercise is initially going to be unpleasant, a fact that should be outweighed by all the wonderful health benefits you’ll reap down the road. That sounds great in theory, but in practice it’s not how we generally make decisions. If something feels bad, we avoid it.
Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology? Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, working with Zachary Zenko of Iowa State and behavioral economist (and best-selling author) Dan Ariely of Duke University, Ekkekakis suggests flipping the usual workout pattern on its head.
Typically, if you go out for a relatively brisk run and maintain an even pace, your effort level will gradually rise throughout the run, and your sense of how “pleasant” it feels will gradually decrease. This is particularly true for someone who’s sedentary and just starting to exercise, since virtually any effort will be above threshold rather than sustainably easy.
(And yes, lots of runners, including me, find the hardest efforts are the most satisfying. Whether this is a learned response or a natural gift, it’s generally not the case for people with no exercise experience.)
Is this pattern of increasing effort a problem? It is if you’re hoping to take away a positive memory of how the workout felt. This is a well-studied effect in behavioural economics, and was discussed in Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow.
One of the examples Kahneman cites is a study he did with Donald Redelmeier of the University of Toronto, examining the pain ratings of colonoscopy patients. One of the key factors in how painful the patients remembered the experience to be - far more important than the duration of the operation or the total pain experienced during the operation - was how painful the last few moments were. That was the part of the experience that stuck in their mind, and this effect has been replicated in many different contexts.
So what happens if, instead of running at a steady pace or getting progressively faster, you start fast and get progressively slower? That’s what Ekkekakis and his colleagues decided to test. They put 46 unfit volunteers through a 15-minute recumbent cycling workout that either ramped from 0 watts to 120 percent of the power associated with their ventilatory threshold, or started at 120 percent and gradually ramped down to zero.
As you’d expect, the pleasure reported during exercise (assessed every three minutes) gradually decreased in the increasing-intensity workout, and gradually increased in the decreasing intensity-workout. The average pleasure reading during But how the volunteers.
But how the volunteers remembered their workout was dramatically different, whether it was 15 minutes later, 24 hours later, or seven days later. Ratings of remembered pleasure were far higher in the decreasing-intensity group. The same was true for “forecasted pleasure,” their assessment of how much they would enjoy doing the same workout again. Overall, which group they were in accounted for 35 to 46 percent of the differences in how much pleasure people remembered and forecasted after the workout.
There’s an ongoing public health debate about whether to emphasise moderate or vigorous exercise, since vigorous exercise can be very effective even in small doses but is generally less pleasurable for beginners and may discourage people from sticking with it. So it’s worth noting that, on average, the decreasing-intensity workout involved about five minutes of “vigorous” exercise (above 77 percent of max heart rate) at the start, then another eight minutes of moderate exercise (above 64 percent) - a decent mix.
Anyway, I thought this was a pretty neat application of behavioural economics to exercise, and it’s certainly something to keep in mind if you’re trying to introduce someone to an exercise routine.
Even for experienced runners, it made me think of the habit of a gentle cool-down. Much of the science behind the cool-down (“flushing out the lactic acid,” for example), has Health & Injuries. But maybe there are other, more subtle benefits to some easy jogging after a punishing workout - a chance to bask in endorphins once all the exertion is finished, and end on a high note.
