Are you struggling to stay physically active and commit to exercising regularly? You might want to stop blaming your lack of willpower or “laziness.” As it turns out, your personality plays a huge role in dictating whether you enjoy exercising or not.
For instance, being an extrovert is associated with experiencing more enjoyment while engaging in high-intensity physical activities. At the same time, neuroticism or having a tendency towards suffering from depression and anxiety is linked to lower levels of enjoyment of activities that require a lot of sustained effort, according to the findings of a recent study.
In a press release, Flaminia Ronca, lead author of the study and an associate professor at University College London, said: “We know that the global population is becoming increasingly sedentary. You often hear about people trying to become more active, but struggling to make lasting changes. In this study, we wanted to understand how personality can influence this to support the development of effective interventions for changes in health behaviour.”
“We found some clear links between personality traits and the type of exercise the participants enjoyed most, which I think is important because we could potentially use this knowledge to tailor physical activity recommendations to the individual – and hopefully help them to become and remain more active,” added Ronca.
Ronca and colleagues recruited 132 participants who underwent fitness testing in their laboratory. Of this, 56 participants were women who had a higher body fat percentage and completed fewer press-ups in 1 minute than the male participants.
But the women participants still scored higher than the males in personality tests, as they were rated higher in three traits: extraversion, agreeableness, and openness. On the flipside, women also reported they were more prone to neuroticism.
All participants were assigned to an 8-week-long cycling and strength training program. But only 86 of them managed to complete it. “These results highlight that, although fitness was improved across personality types–for those who did complete the program – differences in enjoyment and adherence by personality traits suggest that tailoring exercise programs according to personality could potentially maximize these benefits,” the researchers noted in their study that was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology on July 8, 2025.
“ For example, the fact that extraversion predicted higher baseline scores on peak power output and greater enjoyment of high intensity home sessions, and greater effort to exhaustion in post-intervention lab tests suggests that extraverted individuals might particularly welcome the inclusion of high intensity aerobic sessions in a program,” the researchers wrote.
“In contrast, while participants who scored high on neuroticism were less likely to monitor their heart rate during their sessions, they were just as likely to complete the program and return to the lab for post-intervention testing. These individuals exhibited a particularly strong reduction in stress following the exercise program. This suggests that individuals in this group might appreciate being given space for independence and privacy during an exercise program,” they added. “Further studies could investigate if training plans that facilitate autonomy might be more welcomed by those who score highly on neuroticism, therefore supporting greater adherence for those less likely to engage in physical activity.”
