People May Only Notice They ’ve Become More Active After More Frequent Vigorous — But Not Moderate — Physical Activity

By Emily Reynolds Starting a new habit isn’t always easy — we probably only have to look at our own history of failed New Year’s Resolutions to know that. One common frustration is that things don’t happen fast enough — we start doing something that’s supposedly good for us but don’t see a significant behaviour change as quickly as we’d hoped. That certainly seems to be the case with exercise, at least according to a new study in Frontiers in Psychology. It found that people only feel they’ve become more active when they increase the amount of vigorous activity they do —  if it’s moderate, they don’t feel like they’ve changed at all. In the first study, Hermann Szymczak from the University of Konstanz and colleagues collected data from 605 participants taking part in a longitudinal study looking at health behaviour. First, participants were asked to report their physical activity for each of the last 7 days: vigorous physical activity, moderate physical activity and walking. Six months later, participants also reported their perceived change in physical activity since the first time point, choosing one statement they felt best summed up their behaviour: “yes, I became more physically active”, “no, but I tried to become more physically active”, “no and I have not tried” and “no, because I was already physically active before”. At both time points, objective fitness was measured via a bicycle test. In a second study, the same data was...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Cognition Sport Source Type: blogs