Why it isn’t wrong to drive your car to exercise

By Dr. Francis Quinn, PhD. 

• Because predictions of how good something will feel drive whether we do it or not, if something about exercise is offputting this makes it harder to actually do it
• So if driving to the gym, pool or facility is better than difficult or unpleasant active travel options, it’s no bad thing if you’re more likely to actually go and exercise when you get there.

A lot of people rely on their car to get them to as many places as possible. They might say it’s safer, or quicker, or the weather is bad, or there isn’t public transportation, or there aren’t good footpaths to walk on, or all of the above. Or walking, cycling or wheeling might be unappealing for some other reason. But when going to exercise, say at a gym or pool, it might seem perverse and wrong to not get to the facility by active transport such as walking.

In this psychologist’s opinion, anything that increases the chances of the exercise happening is a good thing – remembering that the most effective exercise is whatever that particular person will do again and again. So if getting to the facility by car will make the exercise actually happen, that’s a good thing. Here’s why.

Human behaviour is the result of different forces acting on the person at any one time, like the forces on a plane that combine to make it climb, keep flying, speed up or slow down, or lose altitude. When it comes to exercise, a leading scientific theory that explains whether people will exercise or not is Affective-Reflective Theory, or ART (Brand & Ekkekakis, 2018). Remember that scientific theory means something different to “theory” as in hot air, in the way the word “theory” is used in everyday speech; scientific theory is a set of ideas that take into account previous scientific findings and give a useable, scientifically-testable explanation for why or how something happens. All science is an interplay of scientific theory and research; each needs the other for science to exist.

According to ART, whether someone will exercise today depends on both an automatic part of our brain and a rational part of our brain. These two parts are often in competition – but the automatic part is often the more powerful (Freud used the metaphor of a horse and rider, the horse being the automatic part). A lot of scientific theories in psychology nowadays use this “dual process” idea (Houlihan, 2018, identifies some of the other key ones for health), but ART applies this idea specifically to exercise.

Much human behaviour is based on predictions about what will happen if we do something – predictions which aren’t always true. ART uses this to explain exercise. The automatic part of your brain (the horse) is affected by predictions of how a given activity will feel emotionally, while the rational part (the rider) is affected by gains, goals and plans. At the moment of the opportunity to exercise (time comes to go to the gym, or stairs are in front of you, or friend asks you out on a bike ride), predictions of how good the activity will feel are triggered automatically from memory and beliefs. If predictions are that it will feel good, this triggers an impulse to do the activity; it expecting it to feel bad, it triggers an impulse to avoid (and the horse does or does not accordingly). Sometimes the rider can override that automatic impulse and gets its own way, but only if at that moment the person has enough self-control, energy, etc…. and when you’ve gotten up extra early or it’s after a long day at work, the rider is pretty depleted and the horse is probably going to go where it wants!

The bottom line is that anything that can make the expectation of exercise feeling good (and not bad) is helpful. So if you dread walking, wheeling or cycling to the gym for any reason, you are less likely to go. And one study found that predictions about how we will feel when exercising are more heavily weighted to the early parts of an exercise session (Ruby et al., 2011) – so if just getting to the gym will be offputting, the whole exercise session will be less appealing, and we’re more likely to have an avoidance impulse which takes a lot of effort to manually override.

So that’s why if driving to the gym or pool feels good and active transport to the facility feels bad, whatever the reasons, just go with it. If you’re going to exercise once you get there, it won’t hurt and may help.

References

Brand, R., & Ekkekakis, P. (2018). Affective–Reflective Theory of physical inactivity and exercise. German Journal of Exercise and Sport Research, 48, 48–58. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12662-017-0477-9

Houlihan, S. (2018). Dual-process models of health-related behaviour and cognition: a review of theory. Public Health, 156, 52-59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2017.11.002  

Ruby, M. B., Dunn, E. W., Perrino, A., Gillis, R., & Viel, S. (2011). The invisible benefits of exercise. Health Psychology, 30(1), 67–74. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021859