Social support for working out

If you’re struggling with motivation, if you skip workouts or put in a halfhearted effort, then you need help. You need a social support structure to get you off your couch and make you work hard. You need to stop trying to do this on your own, according to AskMen.

You need extrinsic motivation.

I’ve awoken on Sunday morning with a beer-to-blood ratio that was not conducive to running. It was in the middle of winter with sideways-flying bullet rain, but I knew I was supposed to meet Peter, one of my more masochistic friends, for a run. If I hadn’t shown up, I would have never heard the end of it, so I dragged myself out of bed, suited up and sucked it up. It was brutal. Awesome, but brutal.

“Never underestimate the power of social support,” Bill Kohl, professor of epidemiology at the University of Texas told me. “It’s critical.”

Clara Hughes has won six Olympic medals. I remember hearing her on the radio once talking about how, when she is travelling, she will call friends in various cities in advance to book going for a run with them. She said having the pressure of a friend waiting prompted her to show up. ”I was very fortunate to be on the receiving end of great extrinsic motivation,” Hughes told me. “My coach created an environment where teammates could feed off each other’s energy.”

I know a lot about this. For years I worked out in a crowded gym surrounded by people I knew and enjoyed being around. I was part of a lunchtime crowd of guys who went to lift weights every workday, and it was awesome. Our raunchy locker-room talk was often the best part.

“Human beings are wired to be in groups,” said Bert Carron, a professor of kinesiology who focuses on sports psychology at the University of Western Ontario. “Exercising alone doesn’t work for the majority of people.”

Carron was co-author of a 2006 analysis on the effectiveness of interventions to promote physical activity. It looked at 44 studies, containing 4,578 participants, that lasted anywhere from fewer than three months to more than a year. In the analysis, which was published in the journal Sport & Exercise Psychology Review, Carron and colleagues examined the effect on adherence of a variety of exercise scenarios.

Because they were looking at numerous studies pooled together, they measured adherence with something called “effect size.” I had no clue what that meant, so Carron had to spell out the bottom line in plain English. “Those who exercised alone at home had the lowest adherence rates by far,” he told me. “Comparatively, those in the ‘collective’ group had much higher adherence.” When I asked him how much higher the adherence rates were for collective groups, he said, “A substantial effect. It represents a very large difference.” Carron and I discussed how even if you go to the gym solo to work out, the experience is akin to being in a collective group: You’re surrounded by fellow exercisers with a similar purpose and you see a lot of the same people and even make friends there. So it would have similar adherence rates.

But if you go with a friend, you likely will work harder.

Recent research published in the Annals of Internal Medicine show that people who work out with a partner put more effort into it. Having people to exercise with, especially if they’re in better shape than you, prompts you to give it more effort.

To me, this speaks of ego; you don’t want to look bad. And, no, it’s not just a stupid guy thing; this study was done on women, though I will attest to the stupid guy thing: When lifting weights with those other guys I mentioned, I always pushed myself to the limit to look tough.

And during my run with Peter, I’m sure I went farther and faster than I ever had alone. There are times I get tired and need to stop to walk, but I hate having to ask a running partner to walk for a bit because I need a rest. It’s embarrassing. No one wants to look like a slacker. An interesting thing about the Annals of Internal Medicine study is that participants didn’t actually feel more tired, despite the extra effort. My guess is that, when alone, they’re holding back simply because constant internal motivation is mentally challenging.

The cool thing about that harsh run with my friend is how good we felt afterward. At one point, the rain was near blinding, and we were debating if we qualified as “tough” or “crazy.” Warming up in the car on the drive home, we got to give each other a pat on the back after bearing witness to each other’s crazy toughness.

It made me want to do it again.

For how to look better, live better and know better, visit AskMen.

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