The rewards also had no lasting effect<\/strong>: gym visits stabilized after the modest incentives ended.<\/p>\n Despite timing incentives to when people were already more motivated to exercise, the approach proved ineffective in initiating a healthy behavior that continues to elude most Americans: only 21 percent get a recommended amount of weekly exercise, according to the Centers for Disease Control.<\/p>\n “They wanted to exercise regularly, and yet their behavior did not match their intent, even with a reward,” said Mariana Carrera, an assistant professor of economics at the Weatherhead School of Management and co-author of the study. “People thought earning the incentive would be easy but were way overoptimistic about how often they’d go.”<\/p>\n In the study, new gym members intended to visit three times per week but ended up averaging one weekly visit by the end of the six-week study.<\/p>\n Nearly 95 percent said they expected to visit the gym more than once per week. But by the end of the third month, only about a third had.<\/p>\n The experiment<\/strong><\/p>\n For visiting the gym nine total times during the study (an average of 1.5 times per week), participants were promised one of three modest rewards: a $30 Amazon gift card; a prize item, such as a blender, of equivalent value; or a $60 Amazon gift card. A control group received a $30 Amazon gift card regardless of how often they visited. (The value of incentives was based on what gyms were likely to offer.)<\/p>\n After the first week, 14 percent did not visit the gym again.<\/p>\n Incentivized participants showed a slight increase in gym visits in the sixth week — their last chance to make enough visits to earn their prize. But overall, those given incentives made only 0.14 more visits per week than those promised no reward at all.<\/p>\n “Focusing on people when they’re ready to make a change may be misguided<\/strong>,” said Carrera. “Maybe the internal motivation that gets a person to start a gym membership is unrelated to what drives them to earn financial incentives. What’s clear was there was no complementarity in lumping these two motivations together.”<\/p>\n The group promised the $60 gift card also did not visit the gym more often than those given the $30 gift card or prize.<\/p>\n Researchers thought that selecting the prize item at the outset might create a sense of ownership and prove to be a more powerful motivator, because failing to hit the target visit rate might feel like a loss. However, while the item induced slightly more visits, the difference was insignificant.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the\u00a0Case Western Reserve University press release: Even among people who had just joined a gym and expected to visit regularly, getting paid to exercise did little to make their… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[337],"tags":[87,136,37,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22826"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22826"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22826\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22948,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22826\/revisions\/22948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/ExerciseBike.jpg\")
Even among people who had just joined a gym and expected to visit regularly, getting paid to exercise did little to make their commitment stick<\/strong>, according to a new study from Case Western Reserve University.<\/p>\n