Compete to Get Fit

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 (This is an opinion on the article Want to exercise more? Get yourself some competition from Sciencedaily.com on October 27, 2016.)

Feeling lazy to get up and work those muscles?

Do you need something to motivate you?

In a recent study published in the journal Preventative Medicine Reports from Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania it stated that competition is a stronger motivator for exercise.

 As reported:

For this research, Centola and Jingwen Zhang, Ph.D., lead paper author and recent Annenberg graduate, recruited nearly 800 Penn graduate and professional students to sign up for an 11-week exercise program called “PennShape.” The federally funded, university-wide fitness initiative created by Centola and Zhang provided Penn students with weekly exercise classes in the University fitness center, fitness mentoring, and nutrition advice, all managed through a website the researchers built. After program completion, the students who attended the most exercise classes for activities like running, spinning, yoga, and weight lifting, among others, won prizes.

What the participants didn’t know was that the researchers had split them into four groups to test how different kinds of social networks affected their exercise levels. The four groups were: individual competition, team support, team competition, and a control group.

 Furthermore:

Overwhelmingly, competition motivated participants to exercise the most, with attendance rates 90% higher in the competitive groups than in the control group. Both team and individual competition equally drove the students to work out, with participants in the former taking a mean of 38.5 classes a week and those in the latter taking 35.7. Members of the control group went to the gym far less often, on average 20.3 times a week.

Competition helps a person to focus on setting and raising the bar for himself and for everyone else. It gets a person to work more towards achieving more goals.

Though social support seems positive, it tends to make a person lax in his commitment and unable to substantially achieve goals.

Competition as a motivator goes beyond physical health, but most of all it helps in having a better mentality in life.

Try it now!

One-on-one basketball, anyone?

- See more at: http://awinaway.com/2016/11/10/compete-to-get-fit/#sthash.eKvYLuMB.f3CJWEZt.dpuf