Vowing to stay together “in sickness and in health” has its limits for married couples, at least when it comes to exercise. But spouses can influence each other’s workout habits — sometimes leading to more active lifestyles, and sometimes less active lifestyles, among couples.
That’s the upshot of new research into why people exercise — or don’t — and how active spouses can effectively convince their sedentary partners to get moving, the
New York Times reports.
A new study of the workout habits of middle-aged couples found that changes in one spouse’s routine tend to be echoed in the other’s — highlighting the extent to which our exercise behavior is shaped partly by the people around us as well.
Past studies have shown single men and women generally exercise far more than do married people. Men also typically exercise more after a marriage ends than women. What’s more, parenthood cuts into exercise time more significantly for women, but also for men.
But the latest study examined how marriage affects exercise in the years after a couple’s children have grown, and how changes in one spouse’s exercise routine affect the other.
For the study, presented this month at a scientific meeting of the American Heart Association in Baltimore, researchers from Johns Hopkins University and other institutions tracked answers to health-related questionnaires over a period of many years from thousands of middle-aged American adults.
What they found was that the older couples’ exercise routines tended to become strikingly similar as they grew older. If a woman met the standard recommendation of 30 minutes of daily exercise during her first questionnaire but her husband did not, he was 70 percent more likely to be meeting those recommendations six years later.
Similarly, if a husband met the recommendations during his first questionnaire and his wife did not, she was about 40 percent more likely to be meeting those recommendations a few years later.
Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the study also found that if one spouse slacked off during the years between questionnaires, his or her spouse usually followed suit.
The implication, says Laura Cobb, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins who led the study, is that “spouses can play an outsized role” in exercise behavior during middle age.
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