Motivation at the gym: Payments of pennies can encourage you to exercise

A study of different incentives found that paying people a few pennies for gym visits, with a little extra if they came back after skipping a workout, was most effective

Through Claire Wilson

It’s hard to persuade people to exercise more unless you pay them. A large trial of several incentive programs for gym goers found that few of them had lasting effects, but payouts of just pennies were the most effective boost to keep people active.

Regular exercise appears to reduce the risk for a range of conditions, arterial hypertension cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. Most guidelines recommend that we do at least 150 minutes of moderate level activities every week, like brisk walking, as well as strength exercises such as lifting weights.

Katherine Milkman at the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues looked at over 60,000 members of a US gym chain called 24 Hour Fitness – the company was not involved and did not fund the work, but provided anonymized data .

The team tested 54 different motivational programs a month, such as reminder text messages, getting people to engage and rewarding people with audiobooks or small payouts in the form of points that can be redeemed for cash. Amazon vouchers.

Almost half of the programs increased weekly gym visits over the month, from 9% to 27%. But only four had an effect that continued after the nudging ended. “You lose most of the benefits when you stop offering the program – which suggests that you should continue with the programs,” says Milkman.

The most effective intervention was to offer people points that could be redeemed with Amazon; this equated to 22 cents for each workout followed, plus 9 cents if someone returned to the gym after a missed workout. Programs that pay people to go to the gym without skipping a workout have been found to be less effective after the program is over.

Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038 / s41586-021-04128-4

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