What moves you each day? Is it the miles? Or the time of exercise to the round number of 30 min, 45min? Few more steps, getting to the next thousand for the 10000. Pumping your heart rate. All things that can be monitored.
Speed, Endurance, Stamina. All these make you feel strong and powerful.
You might have heard of apps where you are paid for achievement of health goals.
In a stanford study, it was found that achievement motivates differently depending on how far and close you are to the achievement. After say 3000 steps to 7000 steps, increments of 1000 steps will motivate you but after that you have to start thinking about the 10000 goal.
When you are working on a 30 min workout, from 9 to 21 min you could go by 5 min increments and then the 30 min is so much closer, a bigger achievement and it has the contour line of 30 min.
Another paper that studied millions of myfitnesspal users in their goal setting and achievement in activity tracking apps brought many insightful things to light.
Salient points of the study:
1. With first week behavior, the study was able to predict 79% of the time, the people who would reach their goals. Earlier studies have said that 21 day is the new behavior adopting window, but even 7 days adoption of new behavior is more likely
The activity tracking apps help you in goal adjusting too. Once you set your goal, if you dont get close to it, it gets the goal post close to you and hopefully when you both meet, its starts being the coach and pushes the goal post away from you, challenging you further. Adaptive Interventions Vs Static intervention
When you follow a program, in the end you are recognized as a graduate - for example P90x grad.
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