If you’re not in good physical shape, a physical competition might be one of the last things you want to get involved in.
But if you wish you exercised more, then a new study out this month suggests competition could be the key to increase motivation.
Last year, more than 600 people all across the country who are overweight or obese were given devices to wear that would count how many steps they took. The control group would get a report every day as to how much they moved, while other people in the study were teamed up together.
On some of those teams, participants would work together to each carry some of the load. But other teams were put in competition with each other, and the results were dramatically better.
“We found that competition was the most effective, had the largest increase in physical activity, both during the six month intervention and when that intervention was done,” said Dr. Mitesh Patel, who leads the Penn Medicine Nudge Unit and is an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
“Once a week at the end of the week, participants would get a leader board,” said Patel.
They were spread out over the country and none of the three knew each other before the “game” began.
“Every week they get a leader board which would rank them on the points they earned that week and cumulatively in the study. By giving them that leader board the idea was that it would hopefully promote some competition and that people would want to strive to change their exercise level so they could get to the top of the leader board next week.”
Often enough it did.
“It led to a 922 step per day increase,” said Patel. “Even when we turned competition off it was still motivating. They were walking about 570 steps more than the control arm.
“The average person who entered into this game with competition walked about 100 miles more than the average person in the control arm,” who simply wore the step counting device every day.
Dr. Patel said it hints at how human behaviors can be influenced.
“Competition is a big driver,” he said, by triggering something scientists call “anticipated regret” in the people who were competing, since they didn’t want to be at the bottom of the leader board.
“That drives a behavior called regret aversion, meaning they take action to avoid that regret so they might exercise more or go out for an extra walk because they don’t want to feel the regret of being at the bottom of the leader board.”
The study was published in JAMA Internal Medicine, which is an arm of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
