You might find it superfluous and/or tiresome when friends share their times for their latest mile run on social media, but a new study finds that it will actually motivate you: Exercise, it turns out, can be contagious.
The study, appearing this week in Nature Communications, examined exercise habits of more than one million runners across a five-year period.
“Knowing the running behaviors of your friends as shared on social networks can cause you to run farther, faster, and longer,” study author and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Sinan Aral said in an article on MIT’s Sloan School of Management website.
Previous studies on health and lifestyle have found similar contagions for phenomena like obesity, anxiety and weight loss, reports The New York Times. Pinning down this effect has limitations, though, like people’s propensity for following others like them. Plus, they included self-reported estimates from the people themselves on their eating or exercise habits.
For this study, researchers wanted to evade that issue and look to an unnamed social network for data. Researchers put together a data set noting factors like daily running patterns and social network ties. They found out details through digital fitness trackers on the length of daily runs, how long they took and the amount of calories burned. Then came the inspiration factor.
“On the same day, on average, an additional kilometer run by friends can inspire someone to run an additional three-tenths of a kilometer and an additional ten minutes run by friends can inspire someone to run three minutes longer,” according to the study authors.
The running was more contagious for men than for women, in that they ran longer distances or at a speedier pace if their male friends shared what they did. The same goes for their female friends but it wasn’t as significant. On the other hand, women apparently didn’t pay much mind to their male friends and nearly exclusively changed up their patterns only based on other women.
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Running Is Contagious, Study Says originally appeared on usnews.com
