2006 © Ames Tribune

By: William Dillon
07/18/2006

A study at Iowa State University has found that overweight women consider exercising far less pleasurable when they are pushed even a minor fraction outside of their comfort zone.

Overweight women reported feeling a significant decrease in their pleasure during the study when pushed just 10 percent harder than a pace they self-selected as comfortable. The same result, however, was not experienced among non-overweight women tested on the same grounds.

Going on the premise that humans inherently choose pleasure over pain, this research could lead many people in the overweight population to rethink the widely accepted "No pain, no gain" philosophy that has seemed to pushed so many of them away from exercising and staying in shape, said Panteleimon "Paddy" Ekkekakis, the lead researcher of the study.

"The bottom line is that if the intensity is high enough to make people feel uncomfortable, they are not coming back," Ekkekakis said.

Getting the U.S. population to exercise has become one of the greatest challenges in the public health arena, Ekkekakis said, especially now that 65 percent of the country's population is overweight.

"The problem with physical inactivity is bad with the population at average, but it's even worse with overweight people," he said.

Ekkekakis, an ISU associate professor of health and human performance, and graduate student Erik Lind wanted to look deeper into the specific challenges that face the overweight population while exercising. Prior research has offered limited insight into those challenges, Ekkekakis said, and has proven an even smaller amount through actual experiment.

For the study, Ekkekakis and Lind solicited 35- to 55-year-old women who had not performed any exercise for at least a year. In the end, the researchers found 16 overweight and nine non-overweight women who, in actuality, had not exercised in a much longer time, Ekkekakis said.

The women were asked to perform a standard fitness test of running on a treadmill as a way to test their exhaustion point during the first session. The women were able to self-select the intensity of the treadmill during the second session and change it every five minutes throughout the 20-minute assessment. In the third and final session of the study, the speed of the treadmill was increased 10 percent over what the women had self-selected during the second session.

Ekkekakis and Lind found that the non-overweight women reported feeling the same following the second and third session, but the 10 percent increase proved to be critical for the overweight women who reported a steady decline in how they felt during the session.

"You have to wonder what happens if you hire a trainer and they select the intensity for you thinking they know what they are doing," Ekkekakis said. "They may think they need to impose a high intensity because that is the way you will lose weight (and keep coming back)."

Ekkekakis said he believes the objective of exercising should not be a temporary fix to lose a few pounds, but rather an activity that people like and want to do on a lifetime basis. Anecdotal evidence, he said, has shown that overweight people, in particular, would rather exercise for a longer duration than at a higher intensity.

The catch 22 in that situation, he added, is that many people believe they do not have the time to go longer instead of harder when exercising, so the general philosophy is to push hard.

Ekkekakis is looking for an answer as to why only overweight people start feeling worse when the additional intensity is imposed.

In the end, Ekkekakis said he wants to show whether that decrease in pleasure actually causes enough of a discomfort to lead people to quit exercising. While his hunch and anecdotal evidence say yes, science is not determined on a gut feeling.

William Dillon can be reached at 232-2161, Ext. 361, or
William.Dillon@amestrib.com.