You’ve seen the type. After running a 7.85-mile trail and consulting the GPS tracker on his or her wrist, a person will continue to jog in the parking lot to record those additional 0.15 miles.
“They feel compelled to have that number be 8.0 on the dot versus something less,” says Boulder-based athlete Marty Kibiloski, who has witnessed the phenomenon many times and sympathizes — mostly because he used to be that type.
Kibiloski is a triathlete and former competitive collegiate runner who aspired to the Olympic marathon. “I would never run on trails because I needed something I could measure,” he says. “I ran on the track, on the road. I’d know the length of my workouts to the tenth of the second.”
Drowning in such self-monitored performance statistics, though, Kibiloski didn’t find happiness or lasting motivation until he incorporated meditation and mindfulness into his running, and new research in behavioral science may explain why.
Several recent studies suggest that people who focused on performance-based measures — like distance, speed and calories-burned stats tracked by most fitness devices and apps — exercised 15-34 percent less than people who measured exercise’s benefit in terms of happiness and other quality-of-life outcomes.
“Now we want to see if people with more quality-of-life goals are also going to keep the behavior up over time,” says , a doctoral student in the clinical psychology program at the University of Colorado who is leading a that addresses this question.
Stevens’ dissertation research deals specifically with this issue by studying currently inactive women and the long-term motivation of self-monitoring either their performance outcomes or quality-of-life outcomes (“improved affect,” in clinical psychology terms).
The first group is keeping records of external stats like calories and distance, and the other is going to undergo mindfulness training and then record internal effects like changes in mood, decreased stress, enjoying exercise’s socialization, and having more energy, confidence or inspiration.
“It’s not my stance that these fitness apps out there are not effective,” says Stevens. In fact, any fitness self-monitoring can increase exercise behavior for inactive people, especially in the short term.
“What I’m interested in is what happens long term, when I come back in six months or a year,” she says. “My hypothesis is that people trained toward mindfulness and tolerating stress and discomfort as part of the package will be the people exercising more than those focused on health content.”
The clinical definition of mindfulness used by Stevens in her research is twofold: First, mindfulness creates a state of intentional awareness of your experience. In exercise, this could be noticing your face flush, feeling feedback from your muscles or noticing the thoughts and emotions that arise. Second, mindfulness means you use that awareness to act in conscious, logical ways rather than emotionally reacting.
Self-monitoring exercise in any form, whether recording calories or emotions, begins the first step of the process, but it’s the second step Stevens hopes to test in her study: Can mindfulness training, which will draw attention to internal motivations and values, significantly increase — or improve — exercise behavior over time?
It will be several years before her research can answer that question, but Kibiloski is already convinced. For the past eight years, he’s helped facilitate a workshop at the in northern Colorado that teaches runners about mindfulness and meditation. One key benefit of mindfulness, he says, lies in dispassionately stepping back to understand the difference between competition and comparison.
“Competition, like setting goals or training for a race, can be quite fulfilling. Comparison is where the problems lie. It’s measuring your external accomplishments as your worthiness,” says Kibiloski. “I think that technological stuff, if not managed properly, can really feed that comparison. The danger is that constant feedback potentially feeds a constant need for more. You’re never quite good enough.”
Again, Stevens does not believe fitness apps and devices are inherently harmful, just perhaps incomplete.
“Reviews have been done on these apps, and the majority of them are not based on any type of theory, because programmers aren’t usually trained behavioral scientists,” she says. “Yes, they help track behavior and that helps improve behavior to some extent, but that doesn’t address the issue of, ‘How do I do this? How do I get through the discomfort?’ “
With the help of ongoing research, she hopes to find what kinds of self-monitoring would maximize exercise behavior, perhaps some mixture of performance measurements and increased affect — meaning mood, enjoyment. Distance traveled and increase in pride, or calories burned and decreased stress.
Kibiloski mostly tries to rely on the feedback from his body.
“You’re running, you’re breathing hard, your face is on fire, I guarantee your heart rate is high,” he says. That said, he might have an idea for a new mindful-fitness app or device:
“A lot of people tend to overtrain, so actually, having a gadget that would help you hold yourself back, now that could be useful!”
