Men Need Friends to Support Exercise

N E W   Y O R K, Jan. 8 -- Men rely on other men to help motivate them to exercise, while women apparently need more family support to keep moving, a new study says.

In an effort to understand why physical activity significantly declines during young adulthood, experts from Ohio State University randomly surveyed nearly 1,000 college students. They found men tended to be more active than women, leading researcher Lorraine Silver Wallace to surmise that may be because men have a buddy system that reinforces their activities.

‘’Because males are more active themselves, theirfriends are more likely to be active,’’ she said. She suggests there is a snowball effect influencing men to work out more.

But with fewer college women exercising, the snowball effect doesn’t work as well,Wallace said: ‘’They didn’t have as much social support.’’

Wallace and her colleagues surveyed students at Ohio State University, whereshe received her doctorate before joining as anassistant professor at the University of Texas at Tyler. Her results werepublished in the current issue of the journal Preventive Medicine.

What Motivates People?

The study looked at questionnaire responses from 937 randomly selected students. The students’ exercise patterns were fairly similar to those in national surveys, said co-researcher Janet Buckworth of Ohio State. Thirty-nine percent of Ohio State men reported exercising at least 3 days a week for 20 minutes at a time over the previous six months. In comparison, 26 percent of women did.

Sports medicine experts say that the second largest decline in physical activity usually occurs in college-age adults, with the first big drop experienced at around age 13. “It’s an important age group to work on,” said Dr. Brad Cardinal, co-director of the Sports and Psychology Research Lab at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Ore.

He explains that the trend amongst fitness experts now is to tailor messages to specific groups, depending on age, sex and socioeconomic factors, among others. “One size fits all doesn’t work,” when it comes to exercise programs and getting people motivated to do them.