Exercise Adherence

Guidelines for Exercise Adherence

For the Teacher
  • Educate students on the many health benefits of physical activity, not just weight loss.
  • Find what motivates your students and what they enjoy.
  • Give them the tools and confidence to be successful.
  • Give students choices in activities.
  • Focus on the activity and not the outcome of winning or losing.
  • Discuss ways to overcome barriers to physical activity and prevention of relapse.
  • Match interventions to their stage of physical activity.
 
 
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    For the Student
    • Choose enjoyable activities.
    • Individualize your program.
    • Work with a partner or group.
    • Create an exercise contract.
    • Participate in a variety of activities.
    • Reward yourself for attendance, participation, and goal achievement.
    • Find comfortable and convenient environments to be active.
    • Obtain social support.
    • Keep daily exercise logs.
    • Utilize management skills.

    Strategies for Each Stage of Physical Activity

     
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    Guidelines for Preventing Relapse

    • Plan for and accept minor setbacks.
    • Develop coping strategies to deal with stressful situations.
    • Reduce feelings of guilt whenever you are not able to meet expectations.
    • Use positive self-talk and imagery to avoid negative thoughts about relapsing.
    • Identify situations that put you at risk for relapse and avoid or plan for them.

    The Five Guidelines for Building Motivation

     
    Consider both situations and traits in motivating student
    • Students’ motivations vary with different situations. While they may be motivated to do one task or activity, they may not be for another. Determining which situations evoke motivation is important when dealing with students. Find activities that the students enjoy and allow them to be a part of the decision making process.
    • Motivation also varies from student to student depending on their individual characteristics. This means that as a teacher, you must get to know your students and find ways to involve them all.

    Understand students’ multiple motives for involvement
    • Identify why students participate in physical activity. 
    • Students participate for more than one reason. While educating them on the various benefits of physical activity, focus on the ones that interest children and adolescents the most. This includes: increasing self esteem, improving strength and endurance, reduced feelings of depression, weight control, psychological well being, and healthy body composition.
    • Students have competing motives for involvement. They includes: spending time with friends and family, school, homework, work, leisure time, etc.
    • Cultural emphasis affects motives; some may value physical activity while others may not. As a teacher you must be educated on your students and their value/belief systems. Emphasize the importance of physical activity while still respecting the students’ backgrounds.

    Change the environment to enhance motivation
    • Provide both competition and recreation opportunities. Not all students enjoy competition and vice versa. By offering a mix of both, more of the students needs will be met.
    • Provide multiple difficulty levels for tasks. If a task is too easy, students become bored. If the task is too difficult, the students become frustrated. Use variations to increase or decrease the difficulty of the task so that all students are challenged at the appropriate level.

    Influence motivation
    • Bring energy to a lesson. If you are not excited, neither will they be.
    • Create “buy in.” Each lesson should start by explaining why the objectives are important and how they relate to the students lives. Make the lesson relevant.
    • Create a comfortable environment for the students by making it democratic, providing open communication, not using elimination games or games that use humans as targets, and maximizing student success (aim for 80% success rate).

    Use behavior modification to change undesirable participant motives.
    • Reward students for their effort. Focus on the process and not the product.
    • Use specific and positive feedback.
    • Emphasize what your expectations are.

    Adapted from Motivating People to be Physically Active, Marcus & Forsyth (2003) and
    Foundations of Sport and Exercise Psychology, Weinberg (2007)
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