Inform­ing our friends and fam­ily of our res­o­lu­tions in hope that the social sup­port will encour­age us is an effec­tive tactic–as long as these peo­ple ‘check-in’ on our progress at semi-regular intervals.

That’s the con­clu­sion from a study where three groups of peo­ple had their exer­cise goals tracked under one of three con­di­tions: a reg­u­lar phone call from an exer­cise instruc­tor, a reg­u­lar auto­mated call from a machine, and a con­trol group receiv­ing no calls.

The results showed that hav­ing to report your progress toward a goal dras­ti­cally increases the amount of effort under­taken–espe­cially when it’s a human checking-in on your progress.

The caller, whether human or com­puter, asked the par­tic­i­pants to recite the amount of exer­cise they per­formed dur­ing the past week. Par­tic­i­pants were then con­grat­u­lated on any exer­cise per­formed, and asked how the level might be increased in the week ahead. When lapses occurred […] the goal was to impress upon par­tic­i­pants the impor­tance of resum­ing the work­out as soon as pos­si­ble. All ques­tions were designed to encour­age rather than to scold.

After 12 months, par­tic­i­pants receiv­ing calls from a live per­son were exer­cis­ing, as a mean, about 178 min­utes a week, above gov­ern­ment rec­om­men­da­tions for 150 min­utes a week. That rep­re­sented a 78% jump from about 100 min­utes a week at the start of the study. Exer­cise lev­els for the group receiv­ing com­put­er­ized calls dou­bled to 157 min­utes a week. A con­trol group of par­tic­i­pants, who received no phone calls, exer­cised 118 min­utes a week, up 28% from the study’s start. […]

Some stud­ies by other researchers have sug­gested that after eight weeks of reg­u­lar exer­cis­ing many peo­ple can set­tle into a long-term habit of work­ing out.

The arti­cle also cites a study on how meet­ing in groups to dis­cuss exer­cis­ing goals (group-counseling) showed a qua­dru­pling of exer­cise lev­els after three months and an even greater jump at nine months (long after the group-counseling ses­sions ended in month three). By con­trast, “the exer­cise level of a con­trol group rose dur­ing the study period but at nine months had returned to near-baseline levels”.

via Nudge