Taking Up Exercise With Buddies: It’s a Guy Thing

For college men, exercise works on the buddy system: If their friends exercise, they do, a study says.

This was not true for women, who relied more on support from their families. And a researcher thinks college women do less exercise than men do because the female buddy system isn’t as strong as men’s.

Men benefit from a physical activity snowball effect, said researcher Lorraine Silver Wallace. “Because males are more active themselves, their friends are more likely to be active,” she said. “They have more social support. There are more of them doing it.”

But with fewer college women exercising, the snowball doesn’t grow as much, Wallace said: “They didn’t have as much social support.”

Wallace and her colleagues surveyed students at Ohio State University, where she received her doctorate before taking her current position as an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Tyler. The results were published in the journal Preventive Medicine.

The study looked at questionnaire responses from 937 randomly selected Ohio State students. The students’ exercise patterns were fairly similar to those in national surveys, said co-researcher Janet Buckworth of Ohio State. Thirty-nine percent of Ohio State men reported exercising at least three days a week for 20 minutes at a time over the previous six months. In comparison, 26% of women did.

The study was an attempt to get a handle on what motivates young adults to exercise, because too few do, and many of the exercisers drop out after they graduate, Buckworth said.

The surveys did find some motivating factors.

Men who exercised regularly commonly reported they had high social support from their friends, Wallace said. The 27% of men who weren’t exercising, and weren’t thinking of trying, commonly also had little encouragement from their friends, she said. And the 34% who were occasional exercisers had moderate support, she said.

For women, however, the crucial determinant seemed to be family support. The regular exercisers had high family encouragement to work out, while the 37% of women who weren’t even thinking about starting to exercise commonly said their families weren’t enthused. Another 37% who were occasional exercisers had moderate family support.

But family members of college students often live far from campus. So family may be a weaker substitute for the on-campus peer support that the men have, said Wallace, who called for more efforts to build peer networks for women.

The results of the Ohio State survey rang true for Dr. Robert E. Hunter, a clinical professor at the University of Colorado’s Department of Orthopedics in Denver. “There is not as much emphasis on body performance among the girls and young women,” he said. “It’s a macho thing to be able to run faster and ski faster.”

But, although this is the case for ordinary students, it doesn’t have to be that way--and among active athletes, it isn’t, said Hunter. He lives in the ski resort of Aspen, Colo., and “the subset of kids and adults who are here are the subset for whom body performance is important,” he said. “Women are as motivated and challenged to be fit as the men. It’s absolutely identical.”

Also, the gender gap on regular exercise grows smaller among younger generations, Hunter said. When he was a junior high and high school student, sports for women “was geeky,” said the doctor, who described himself as being in his early 50s.

Being a female athlete is not geeky now, Hunter said. He has a 12-year-old daughter and a 14-year-old son, and “the athletic opportunities for my daughter are just as numerous as for my son,” he said.

The challenge is to bring the benefits to more girls and women, Hunter said. The gender gap in exercise is going to keep shrinking, “but it hasn’t changed all the way yet.”