Psychological Benefits of Exercise and How to Maintain Your Exercise Goals
Before my career in business and then philanthropy, I was a professor and the Director of Behavioral Medicine at The California School of Professional Psychology. My focus was on factors that fostered heart-healthy lifestyles in individuals and communities. Promoting exercise was, as now, central to my professional and personal goals.
I worked with individuals recovering from heart attacks and I followed interesting community projects like one in which exercise, including walking, was used to combat type 2 diabetes, which was endemic in the Zuni community. My wife’s blog on our website focuses on the medical benefits of exercise. But the psychological benefits also prove to be very important.
Regular moderate exercise is associated with the following psychological benefits:
Improved ability to cope with stressors
Improved self-esteem, including improved body image (when associated with desired weight reduction)
Increased energy
Improved confidence in one’s physical abilities
Decreased anxiety
Decreased depression
Those of you who exercise regularly have probably observed some or all of these benefits. Unfortunately, those benefits are only achieved while we remain regularly active. But many people, including some in our community of EH Walkers, struggle to motivate themselves to walk (or engage in any form of regular exercise) on a consistent basis. Unfortunately, people whose mood could benefit the most are least likely to exercise regularly!
Bandura’s self-efficacy theory (1977) and my own personal experience may be helpful to those of you who have a hard time developing and/or maintaining a regular exercise program. My opinion is that most people have at least some difficulty in sticking with a regular exercise program.
When I turned 36, I became a long-distance runner after many years of playing tournament tennis. In the previous year, during my postdoctoral internship, I had gotten horribly out of shape and significantly heavier, despite years of consistent exercise and maintaining a healthy weight. During that internship, my clinical supervisor brought lots of donuts to meetings every day (which of course I had to eat); and my wife and I enjoyed an unusual amount of eating during this period in which we were really stressed after the birth of our first child, who didn’t seem to like to sleep. And worst of all, I wasn’t doing any exercise whatsoever!
So how did a habitual exerciser and careful eater become a slug? It was actually very easy. I underwent major life changes, which are all too often associated with slipping into bad habits. I went from being a carefree graduate student to a postdoctoral intern with a considerable commute and a newborn son. Starting a regular exercise program and maintaining one both require strong intention and awareness of potential obstacles.
An understanding of Bandura’s self-efficacy theory helps to explain how I could go from being out of shape and overweight to successfully training for the LA marathon and continuing long-distance running for many years. It also informs how I have developed my walking program after back disk disease sidelined me from being a distance runner.
Bandura’s self-efficacy research (and research studies using his theory) demonstrates conclusively something that is actually common sense,but the implications of this research and the consistency of findings are profound. He has demonstrated that while there are multiple sources of information that build self-confidence (which terms “self-efficacy”), by far the most important is one’s own observation that they have successfully performed a specific behavior. The common sense way to put this is that success breeds success and failure breeds failure. The implications of this outlook lead to what I have written about "Personal Best.”
So what are the implications for starting an exercise program? Set goals that are achievable, but a bit of a stretch. For me, when I was going from slug to distance runner, that meant doing a 1.5 mile run super slowly on day one and for several days thereafter. Having been athletic only 15 months, I could have easily tried for more and that would have likely led to failure and a loss of self confidence. After that first week of 1.5 mile runs,, I reset my goal to 2.5 miles for the next week, and continued to set a new distance for each ensuing week as I mastered the previous week’s goal. Following self-efficacy theory, the idea is to set achievable “stretch” goals, monitor your progress, and continually reset until you reach your desired ultimate goal. Depending on the activity you’re pursuing, you may also want to set goals for speed as well as distance. For example, I started my running at 12 minutes/mile and it took many months before I could run at 7-1/2 minutes /mile.The self-efficacy system can be used for setting and achieving realistic goals for weight loss and other things you might want to achieve.
Maintaining your exercise routine requires intention and having a realistic maintenance goal. Recognizing “high risk” obstacles is very important. By that I mean, what could happen that could derail your program? For example, a child who doesn’t sleep, a new job, an injury, etc. Try to develop a coping strategy, which may involve lowering your goal — less distance and fewer days a week exercising. If your program is derailed, plan a strategy for getting back on track, which likely will involve changing your initial start-up goals. Being responsible to a friend, group, etc.--for instance a group of fellow walkers– can really help with motivation and accountability.
I have talked a lot about running, but the same strategy of setting and progressively resetting goals goes for walking as well, which is what I chose to switch to after my disk problems emerged. The goals should include the number of days you want to walk, the time you want to spend walking, and the distance you want to cover in that time. Again, BE REALISTIC! As the Chinese proverb goes, “the journey of 1,000 miles begins with the first step.” Another of my favorite aphorisms that applies here is “Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
EH Walkers will have lots of great tips on our website about how to enjoy and maintain your walking that will be contributed to by the EH-Walker participants. Having a community of supporters really helps. Perhaps you will find a walking group in your area or a partner or two you can walk with, and hopefully you can encourage them to join the EH-Walkers community.
I hope that walking for a purpose will provide a big incentive to walk a lot and to maintain your program. Each mile you walk will help someone living in poverty benefit from the work of the amazing, cost-effective, high impact nonprofits that we support.
Feel Good. Do Good.
Charlie
