Enhancing Exercise Motivation: A Guide to Increasing Fitness Center Member Retention - Softcover

Annesi, James J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0965243206 ISBN 13: 9780965243209

Publisher: Fitness Management Leisure Pubns, 1996

Synopsis

Who wouldn't want to keep their clients coming back to their exercise programs? In this book, the many theories and research findings in member retention are now fashioned into practical step-by-step methods that your staff can apply. It is directed at fitness center administrators and professionals who can make a monumental difference in facilitating maintained exercise for their clients and, in turn, promote their own facility's success. The focus is on nurturing the exercise habit and increasing retention rates.

With this book, you will learn what factors have long-term influence on people's exercise habits. Using a full-scale technology of exercise adherence methods and strategies produced from years of carefully conducted research, the book's author shows you how these products of scientific inquiry can be taken out of the research world, put into practical form, and used by you, the practitioner. Until now, such techniques have been left largely in the st! orage vault of academia. This book will serve as your step-by-step guide for taking the relevant contributions from exercise psychology, behavioral psychology, performance enhancement and stress management, and putting them to work for your immediate benefit. Exercise is treated as a desirable behavior over which you, along with your clients, may gain control. Strategies such as relapse prevention, goal-setting, dissociation from discomfort and motivational assessment will become yours to enhance exercise persistence and raise retention rates. You and are staff are given the necessary tools to affect change in a systematic, flexible, dependable manner.

About this title

About the Author

Author James J. Annesi, Ph.D., is an exercise and sport psychology consultant, researcher and instructor. He is the director of Enhanced Performance Technologies, a New Jersey-based consulting firm specializing in the design and delivery of psychologically-based techniques that maximize physical performance.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

To increase retention in your facility, the important factors for you to consider are those that concentrate on elements that you can effectively change. Here's a look at how research in three categories assessment, program implementation, performance feedback and support can be applied to the exercise setting.

Assessment

Research does not yet predict with complete accuracy who will drop out of an exercise program. But, if you can successfully categorize clients by their likelihood to persist, you can judge how much of what kinds of attention you should give them.

Rod Dishman has studied the link between self-motivation and exercise adherence, and has developed a way to measure that motivation. His short test called the Self Motivation Inventory (SMI) has successfully predicted likelihood of dropout in aerobics classes, and athletic training sessions. In the latter case, the SMI correctly classified more than 80 percent of all exercisers when body fat percent (another dropout indicator) was also accounted for.

Program implementation

When designing programs, four strategies can work to increase adherence: balance sheets, goal setting, exercise prescription and contracting.

In the balance sheet approach, a client is directed through the process of writing down the positives and negatives they perceive in adhering to their exercise participation. The use of balance sheets is very cost-effective. Three experiments tested whether the use of a balance sheet would affect attendance. In all three, better retention resulted for the groups using balance sheets than those not using them.

Goal setting may be one of the strongest motivation tools for retention. John Martin and his associates found that when clients set goals, exercise class attendance improved. When flexible exercise goals were used, improvement was better than with fixed, rigid goals. They also found that goals to be achieved in five weeks led to better retention than goals to be achieved in one week. J.K. Nelson demonstrated that "do-your-best" goals did not work nearly as well as when exercisers were committed to a tangible, measurable goal.

Locke and Lathan suggest that: a) goals should be broken down into short-term or intermediate goals to help attain ultimate goals, b) goals must be accepted by the client, c) challenging goals are better than easy ones, d) tracking progress is useful to remain committed to goals, and e) a plan of action facilitates goal attainment.

Exercise prescriptions must be based largely on established physical guidelines for safety and effectiveness, but psychological factors also play a role. Within a private fitness center setting, exercisers who believed that their programs were developed based on their own activity choices attended more classes than those given a standard program. Training frequency, intensity and length were examined for retention effect by Michael Pollock et al. who found no significant differences for clients exercising one, two, three, four or five days per week. Continuous exercise was associated with better adherence and was preferred by 90 percent of participants compared to high-intensity interval training or a combination of the two. As the length of sessions increased, though, so did dropout. Sessions no longer than 60 minutes, including warm-up and cool-down, facilitate high rates of adherence.

A substantial retention improvement was gained when cardiac rehabilitation patients signed agreements to comply for six months with an exercise program, while recording their heart rate improvements. Contracts, which were rewarded by the refund of $1 for each week successfully completed, improved attendance in college students tested. Wysocki et al. returned previously deposited personal items to clients as they upheld their formalized commitments. Volume of exercise was significantly increased for those "contracting" longer than the experiment (10 weeks), as well as at a one-year follow-up point.

Performance feedback

Martin et al. tested whether personal feedback or feedback in a group was better in terms of minimizing dropout in an adult running program. Instructors either praised the group as a whole at the end of class or delivered information tailored to each person. In the group-praise conditions, dropout averaged about 50 percent. In the personal feedback conditions, dropout averaged about 10 percent. Feedback may be about clients' fitness improvements, goal attainments, effort outputs, etc.

Private and public charting of attendance has been examined. Weber and Wertheim divided women at a community fitness center into three groups, a self-monitoring group, a self-monitoring plus special attention group and a control group. Self-monitoring groups charted their attendance on a graph, and returned it to the researchers every two weeks, for three months. Both self-monitoring attendance groups maintained higher attendance than the control group.

Support

Support of client's exercise behaviors is a major factor in the maintenance of exercise motivation. It's interesting to note that developing research suggests males and females may benefit from different types of social support.

Heinzelmann and Bagley found that almost 90 percent of exercisers preferred to work out with others, and many studies have linked high group cohesion with increased levels of retention. King and Frederiksen found jogging was twice as frequent in groups with support as opposed to those running without guidance on group formation or team building. Massie and Shephard found that 53 percent dropped out of an individual program based on the Cooper aerobic point system, while only 18 percent dropped out of the program in a YMCA group. Most group-adherence research projects now use the brief Group Environment Questionnaire to measure a client's level of cohesion and to evaluate strategy effectiveness for increasing camaraderie and reducing dropout.

Intervention packages

The Member Adherence Program (MAP), which is described in the rest of this book, also packages a wide variety of techniques into a manageable technology. The pilot application of MAP at a 3,000-member fitness facility improved the retention of members who received the MAP treatment by 22 percent over the group who received the typical good services of the club.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fitness Management Leisure Pubns
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0965243206
• ISBN 13: 9780965243209
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 121