In-Your-Face Fitness
For best exercise, don't be lonely or late
Activities done in groups and early in the day seems to show the best success rates.

Thinking about starting an exercise program to help lose weight? If you find some activity that allows you to regularly work out early in the day with the same group of people — and it's something you like — then you're well on your way.

Conversely, if you plan to exercise at the end of the day at home, alone, on some machine you bought from an infomercial, prepare to continue being fat.

Social context, self-control and positive reinforcement play critical roles in exercise adherence, and the data provide interesting insight that can be used to increase your likelihood of following through.

Let's start with a look at "what" you choose to do.

Running burns more calories than cycling, but you may enjoy the latter yet hate the former. Operant conditioning theory states that if a stimulus, such as exercise, elicits a positive response, such as enjoyment or contentment, then people will seek to reproduce those feelings by engaging in the behavior again. The lesson: When picking an exercise, choose maximum enjoyment over maximum results, and the positive reinforcement will help you stick with it.

Moving on to "when," things gets simpler: The later in the day you push your exercise session, the more likely you are to bail out and instead plow butt-first into a Doritos-covered couch.

Barbara Brehm is a professor of exercise and sport studies at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., and in her 2004 book, "Successful Fitness Motivation Strategies," she outlined how self-control is a limited resource and that the stress we experience during the day gradually erodes our willpower to exercise. "People who exercise early in the morning have the highest adherence rates; they have not yet expended time and energy overcoming the barriers that inevitably develop during the day," she states.

"Human beings are wired to be in groups," said Bert Carron, a professor of kinesiology focusing on sport psychology at the University of Western Ontario. "Exercising alone doesn't work for the majority of people."

So the next time you see an infomercial selling stuff to Turbo-Fit your Cross-Jam or P90 your X-Ab-Flexor, all from the comfort of your living room, consider whether you're really going to watch those DVDs or use that equipment.

By James S. Fell, April 4, 2011; Fell is a certified strength and conditioning specialist in Calgary, Canada.

latimes.com/health/la-he-fitness-exercise-adherence-20110404,0,746272.story