Matching exercise to personality
Gretchen Knight has been there and done that when it comes to sports and recreation. She remembers biking as a youngster, sampling yoga when it was trendy, and beginning to play tennis by virtue of marriage. “I married into a tennis family, so I figured I’d better.”
Family obligation wasn’t enough to stay on the court, and yoga lost its luster. Like many in the information age, Knight has fallen off the fitness bandwagon time and time again. “There’s nothing that really appeals to me to any great degree” says Knight, a graphic designer. “I sit still too much during my day in front of the computer, transfixed, not breathing, not blinking. I am at a point in my life--I can feel it in my body--where I’m ready to move,” she says.
Knight has tried different types of exercise over the years but has never felt motivated or interested enough to apply staying-power to any single pursuit. “There’s nothing that really appeals to me to any great degree,” she admits. And some popular domains--weight training--repulse her: “Lifting weights with machines has no appeal to me whatsoever,” she says.
Cardiac nurse, fitness guru, and author Peg Jordan says the trick to keeping people motivated is wrapping a fitness routine around one’s personality. “I married two theories, a theory of movement analysis and a theory of personality,” Jordan says. “What I found was that there is this incredible correspondence between the ways people think and behave, and the way they move.”
Pursue the wrong activity for your fitness instinct and chances are you won’t stick with it, says Jordan. “Within six to twelve weeks, most people drop out of their exercise goals,” she says. “Eight out of ten need new inspiration, new hope, new solutions to stick with exercise.”
Based on four years of behavioral, social, and psychological research, Jordan has determined that people can be divided into racers, dancers, strollers, or trekkers. The theory of these four Jungian-based fitness personalities, or “quadrants,” is described in Ms. Jordan’s book “The Fitness Instinct” (Rodale Press, 1999).
Jordan thinks natural movement type is so integrated into a person’s being she appoints it as a seventh sense, after the five traditional senses and intuition.
The racer craves competition. A tennis or racquetball match two or three times a week would be ideal.
The stroller would best thrive on a buddy system activity like walking with a friend. “This is somebody who is very supportive, very social, very relational,” says Jordan.
The dancer personality--spontaneous, creative, and enthusiastic--requires variety, something different on each outing.
Trekkers are orderly, logical, and analytical. “Now these are the two out of ten Americans who really have stuck with the exercise prescription,” says Jordan.
Knight considers herself a stroller.
Skeptics, including William Sukala of the American Council on Exercise, say the theory just a new spin on an old idea: “We don’t really know to what extent this theory is valid,” says Sukala.
He says there is value in Jordan’s observations if they will help people get off the couch and move. “There really is no secret to fitness,” says Sukala. “We don’t have to exercise until we’re blue in the face. We don’t have to lift heavy weights, and do what the advertisers would suggest. We just need to get out and move.”
Jordan concludes from almost 2,000 interviews that the messages and images--narrow hips, lean abs, tight buns--employed by the commercial fitness industry create in some despair, bodily shame, and intimidation. “Maybe they signed up for a health club, walked in the door, and turned around on their heels and walked out again,” says Jordan of the notable dropout rates at fitness clubs.
She says anyone aiming to add more sporty activity into life must first undergo “cognitive cleanup.” “If you approach your exercise routine brand new with the same negative voices--’I really hate my body’--negative motivation only lasts for a very short time. You have got to start to self-love right now.”
Her message combines what she calls “the joy of movement” with personality and practicality. For those who can’t find time to exercise Jordan draws on recent fitness findings from Stanford University in suggesting an active lifestyle approach she calls “Gather 30 as you go.” “Instead of the big, long, thirty minute block of exercise, we’re finding out that people can get the same benefits by doing smaller spurts and accumulating thirty minutes as they go through the day. It allows people to jump up from their work station and just do rock and roll for five minutes, and run up and down stairs. This has been wonderfully freeing for people.”
Jordan says those who have repeatedly failed at sticking with a more active routine must claim “body sovereignty” and take back the responsibility for fitness success. “They need to transfer back all that authority back within and say, ‘I’m doing this for me because it feels good.’”
So that work and play are not confused, a person must quiet the mind with meditation, visualization, inspirational reading, or music before starting a walk or a workout, she says.
Finally, Jordan emphasizes the importance of deep rest in healing the micro-damage done to activated muscles and avoiding injury.
Knight says she has found a natural fitness fit with walking, biking, and tai chi. She says the combination just feels right. One proof she’s found her fitness personality: she rarely misses a workout, and attends a tai chi class. The routine makes her feel good about herself. “I feel happier, a lot happier,” she says.
