Why Do Home Gyms Work for Some, Not Others?
OK, it’s not the home gyms that don’t work for some people, it’s the people that don’t work with home gyms. New York Times health columnist Tara Parker-Pope has done the research, and she reports that a study of 205 adults published in the the Annals of Behavioral Medicine found that those with a home exercise machine were 73 percent more likely to start exercising, but after one year they were 12 percent more likely to have quit than people in the study who did not have home equipment. Parker-Pope found that having home exercise equipment or not having home exercise equipment had far less influence on stick-to-it-ness than did other factors, such as a conviction that one has the power to achieve his or her goals. “In the Annals study,” Parker-Pope writes, “those who scored high on psychological measures of self-efficacy were nearly three times as likely to be exercising after a year as those with lower self-efficacy scores, whether or not they owned an exercise machine.” Read more in
