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Influencing Your Gym Behaviour

By Peter Liu

[Fitness]

A trip to your local gym really doesn’t have to be a frightening experience. Peter Liu boldly ventures into the exercise machine paradise.

With all the heavy holiday dinners out of the way, it’s time to once again hit the gym and work off the pounds. Or at least that’s the promise we make ourselves every year, right? After the Christmas indulgences and the permissible intake of holiday goodies, gym and health club memberships surge with new and familiar members alike, all with the same united goal. Individuals who frequent the gym are all different, each with separate schedules, workout patterns, exercise goals and attitudes. Where attitudes are concerned, every person who decides to hit up the gym has different intentions and levels of commitment, as well as different views about going to the gym in general. Some people love it and see it as their social hub, while others use the gym purely as an exercise tool to shed annual excess weight. Whatever your exercising style or workout attitude, the key is to ensure that you and the people around you exercise more.

Analyzing Gym Attendance

Published in the January/February 2010 issue of the Journal of Nutrition Health Education and Behavior is a study from the George Washington University Medical Center in which researchers questioned the public’s intent to exercise at gyms and health clubs. Through an online survey on surveymonkey.com, 1,552 people were surveyed with 989 subjects classified as overweight. Under the assumption that subjects would regularly go to the gym twice a week for a month, subjects were asked things about buying trendy clothes to exercise in, thoughts on exercising around young people and the opposite sex, having to deal with pushy salespeople, views on exercising improving looks and health, special exercise equipment and intention to exercise.

The gym survey was based on Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior, which included a person’s attitude towards a certain behaviour in question, the social pressures they experienced to perform that behaviour and the level of difficulty with which they could perform that behaviour.

Club Psyche

Researchers were astonished to find that the more negatively an overweight person felt about exercising in a gym, the more frequently those emotions would regulate their exercise schedule, more so than the positive facts about the benefits of regular exercise. They also found that the majority of overweight people surveyed believed that exercising would improve overall appearance and self-image, more than people of normal weight. The overweight subjects surveyed also felt more embarrassed exercising around the opposite sex or young people and felt they would be pressured by gym/health club employees and salespeople. Overall, however, attitudes about exercising in a gym/health club were the same between overweight and normal weight groups surveyed.

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