Fitness
AI Reveals What Keeps People Committed to Exercise – Neuroscience News
Summary: A new study has used machine learning to identify the key predictors of physical activity adherence, analyzing data from nearly 12,000 individuals. The research found that time spent sitting, gender, and education level were the strongest indicators of whether someone met weekly exercise guidelines.
By training models on lifestyle, demographic, and health survey data, researchers could predict exercise habits more flexibly than traditional approaches. These insights could inform more effective fitness recommendations and public health strategies tailored to individual needs.
Key Facts:
- Top Predictors: Sedentary time, gender, and education level were the most consistent predictors of exercise adherence.
- Study Scope: Researchers used machine learning on data from 11,683 participants in a national health survey.
- Potential Impact: Findings could improve personalized workout plans and inform health policy.
Source: University of Mississippi
Sticking to an exercise routine is a challenge many people face. But a University of Mississippi research team is using machine learning to uncover what keeps individuals committed to their workouts.
The team – Seungbak Lee and Ju-Pil Choe, both doctoral students in physical education, and Minsoo Kang, professor of sport analytics in the Department of Health, Exercise Science and Recreation Management – hopes to predict whether a person is meeting physical activity guidelines based on their body measurements, demographics and lifestyle.
They have examined data from about 30,000 surveys. To quickly sort through such a huge data set, they’ve turned to machine learning, a way of using computers to identify patterns and make predictions based on the information.
The group’s results, published in the Nature Portfolio journal Scientific Reports are timely, Kang said
“Physical activity adherence to the guidelines is a public health concern because of its relationship to disease prevention and overall health patterns,” he said.
“We wanted to use advanced data analytic techniques, like machine learning, to predict this behavior.”
The Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, suggests that adults should aim for at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise, or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise, each week as part of a healthy lifestyle.
Research shows that the average American spends just two hours per week on physical activity – half of the four hours recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Lee, Choe and Kang used public data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a government-sponsored survey, covering 2009-18.
“We aimed to use machine learning to predict whether people follow physical activity guidelines based on questionnaire data, and find the best combination of variables for accurate predictions,” said Choe, the study’s lead author.
“Demographic variables such as gender, age, race, educational status, marital status and income, along with anthropometric measures like BMI and waist circumference, were considered.”
The researchers also considered lifestyle factors including alcohol consumption, smoking, employment, sleep patterns and sedentary behavior to understand their impact on a person’s physical activity, he said.
The results showed that three key factors – how much time someone spends sitting, their gender, and their education level – showed up consistently in all the top-performing models that predict exercise habits, even though each model identified different variables as important.
According to Choe, these factors are especially important for understanding who is more likely to stay active and socially connected, and they could help guide future health recommendations.
“I expected that factors like gender, BMI, race or age would be important for our prediction model, but I was surprised by how significant educational status was,” he said. “While factors like gender, BMI and age are more innate to the body, educational status is an external factor.”
During the analysis, the researchers excluded data from people with certain diseases and responses missing physical activity data. That culled the relevant data to 11,683 participants.
The researchers say machine learning gives them more freedom to study the data. Older methods expect things to follow a straight-line pattern, and they don’t work well when some pieces of information are too similar.
Machine learning doesn’t have those limits, so it can find patterns with greater flexibility.
“One limitation of our study was using subjectively measured physical activity data, where participants recalled their activity from memory,” Choe said.
“People tend to overestimate their physical activity when using questionnaires, so more accurate, objective data would improve the study’s reliability.”
Because of this, the researchers say they could use a similar method for future research in this area, but explore different factors, including dietary supplements use, using more machine learning algorithms or relying on objective data instead of self-reported information.
That could help trainers and fitness consultants produce workout regimens that people can actually stick with for the long haul.
About this AI and exercise research news
Author: Clara Turnage
Source: University of Mississippi
Contact: Clara Turnage – University of Mississippi
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“Machine learning modeling for predicting adherence to physical activity guideline” by Seungbak Lee et al. Scientific Reports
Abstract
Machine learning modeling for predicting adherence to physical activity guideline
This study aims to create predictive models for PA guidelines by using ML and examine the critical determinants influencing adherence to the PA guidelines. 11,638 entries from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey were analyzed.
Variables were categorized into demographic, anthropometric, and lifestyle categories. 18 prediction models were created by 6 ML algorithms and evaluated via accuracy, F1 score, and area under the curve (AUC).
Additionally, we employed permutation feature importance (PFI) to assess the variable significance in each model.
The decision tree using all variables emerged as the most effective method in the prediction for PA guidelines (accuracy = 0.705, F1 score = 0.819, and AUC = 0.542).
Based on the PFI, sedentary behavior, age, gender, and educational status were the most important variables.
These results highlight the possibilities of using data-driven methods with ML in PA research.
Our analysis also identified crucial variables, providing valuable insights for targeted interventions aimed at enhancing individuals’ adherence to PA guidelines.
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Nov. 13, 2025 – You won’t find any support groups for dead butt syndrome, aka gluteal amnesia, sleepy glutes, flabby butt, longback, or, for King of the Hill fans, diminished gluteal syndrome.
“They all mean sort of the same thing: weak gluteal muscles,” said Dean Somerset, a clinical exercise physiologist based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and co-author of Rock Solid Resilience.
If you guessed that small, weak, and poorly functioning glutes are often the result of too much sitting and too little exercise, you wouldn’t be wrong, according to Somerset.
Meanwhile, Los Angeles-based physical therapist Chad Waterbury, DPT, has seen it in healthy, fit, active clients, including a few professional athletes. “When we do exercises like squats, deadlifts, lunges, it’s very easy for other muscles to do the work you want the glutes to do,” Waterbury said
In both populations, the glutes stop doing what they should, and that can lead to serious problems up and down the movement chain.
If misfiring glutes force the lower-back muscles to take on loads they’re not meant to handle, the result can be years of back pain. And if the glutes fail to perform their stabilizing role in exercise and sports, you could be looking at chronically sore knees, or perhaps even an ACL injury.
That means the Venn diagram of dead butt sufferers includes people who sit a lot, active people, those with back pain, and those with knee pain. All those people, all that overlap, all those butts.
Is your butt among them?
Putting a Name to the Pain
Stuart McGill, PhD, coined the term “gluteal amnesia” to describe what happens when pain causes people to change how they move.
“In people with longer-term pain, the pattern of nerve pulses distributed to the muscles can become corrupted,” he explained. “The pain kicks off an inhibition pathway, so the brain finds a different way to do the same basic thing.”
That, in turn, changes the way muscles like the hamstrings contribute to the movement.
“But even when the pain has gone away, the brain often remembers the painful pattern,” McGill said. Which means it also forgets how to use the muscles appropriately and efficiently.
McGill, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Waterloo and author of Back Mechanic, showed how the process works in a 2013 study. In that paper, he and his co-authors used “gluteal amnesia” and “gluteal inhibition” interchangeably.
The latter term is probably more appropriate, given that some people hear the former and think it implies gluteal dementia, as if the misplaced movement patterns can never be restored.
Fortunately for the gluteally deficient among us, they can. Just not in the way most of us would assume.
Hips, Femur, Knees, and Woes
While McGill was teasing out the connection between gluteal amnesia and back pain, Christopher Powers, PT, PhD, was looking at how abnormal glute activation patterns could lead to knee problems.
“The gluteal muscles control the femur,” he explained. “The femur’s half the knee joint. So by definition, the gluteal muscles control half the knee.”
Powers is associate chair of the Division of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy at the University of Southern California, where he studies the root causes of the lower-body injuries. And he addresses a lot of them with the athletes and patients he sees at the Movement Performance Institute in Los Angeles, which he founded and owns.
His research has shown that a key function of the gluteal muscles is to prevent the femur from rolling inward during sports, exercise, or everyday physical activities.
“Once you stop using the muscle, the brain kind of forgets about it,” Powers said. “You lose the neural connectivity.”
And if the brain forgets how to stabilize the femur, just about anything you do, from walking to landing after a jump, will put stress on your knee joints.
How to Know if Your Butt is Dead or Dying
Remember, given that sedentary and active people have this issue, aside from chronic knee or back pain, you may not be able to tell if your glutes are firing properly or improperly.
Waterbury recommends this self-test: the single-leg glute bridge.
Lie on your back with one leg lifted out straight and the other leg bent at a 45-degree angle with the foot flat on the floor. Your thighs should be parallel. Raise your butt so your thighs and torso form a straight line.
Hold that position for 20 seconds (or as long as you can up to 20), while paying close attention to which muscles you feel are working the hardest. Lower your hips and repeat with the other leg.
If you felt the strongest contraction in your hamstrings or lower back, instead of your glutes, you need to improve your gluteal activation. Also, muscle imbalances are common, so it’s also not unusual for you to feel weaker in one glute or the other.
Two of Powers’s studies offer encouraging news for those whose glutes have lost their way.
The first, published in 2016, found that a week of glute-activation exercises increased neural drive to the muscles.
A follow-up, published in 2022, found that the same exercise protocol made the muscles more able to stabilize the femur.
So let’s take a look at the program.
Wake Up, Dead Butt
Powers’s program includes just three exercises, all of which may look familiar: clamshell, side-lying hip abduction, and fire hydrant.
Even if you haven’t used the exercises in your own routines, you’ve probably seen other people doing variations of them.
Here’s the catch: To do the program correctly, you have to forget what you’ve done or seen.
Instead of doing sets and reps, you’ll hold each position for up to a minute at a time. And you’ll need to do the program almost every day.
“When you do reps – up and down, up and down – the focus tends to be on the movement,” Powers said. Isometric holds like these require something else: intense concentration on squeezing the muscle in one continuous position.
That extended muscle activation allows the brain to reopen its channels of communication. If you follow the isometric holds with exercises that use the glutes, like squats or step-ups, you reinforce those neural signals.
To get the most out of the exercises, you’ll want to use a miniband positioned around your thighs, just above your knees. When you can hold a position for a full minute, use a more challenging band the next time.
Here’s a closer look at each exercise.
Clamshell
Lie on your side with your legs together and your hips and knees bent 45 degrees.
Lift your top knee straight up while keeping your feet in contact with each other.
Feel the squeeze in your glutes and hold for up to a minute. Switch sides and repeat.
Side-Lying Hip Abduction
Lie on your side with your top leg straight and bottom leg bent at the knee about 45 degrees.
Lift your top leg up and slightly back.
Feel the squeeze in your glutes and hold for up to a minute. Switch sides and repeat.
Fire Hydrant
To Powers, the fire hydrant is the best of the activation exercises. “If I were to pick one, I’d take it over the other two,” he said.
But it’s also the trickiest one to get right, since you’re asking your glutes to perform three functions, as you’ll see:
Kneel on all fours with your hips parallel to the floor and your hands shoulder-width apart.
Without shifting your hips, lift one leg up (hip abduction) and back (hip extension). Position your thigh so it’s neither perpendicular to your torso (straight out to the side) nor aligned with it (straight back), but instead about halfway between those two points. (It’s called “fire hydrant” because you’re mimicking a dog doing what a dog does to a fire hydrant.)
Now turn your thigh outward (external rotation) until you feel tension in the band.
The goal isn’t to achieve any particular range of motion. It’s to reach a position you can hold while keeping your hips level with the floor.
Hold for up to a minute, switch sides, and repeat.
Restoring Your Seat of Power
People in Powers’s studies did three isometric holds of each exercise, with each leg, twice a day for seven consecutive days.
But Waterbury, who studied under Powers at USC, uses a streamlined version of the program with clients, athletes, and patients.
Start with these exercises:
- Clamshell, 30 seconds per side
- Side-lying hip abduction, 30 seconds per side
- Fire hydrant, 30 seconds per side
Do the exercises six days a week for four weeks, either on their own or as part of a warmup before a workout. “That’s plenty to get the glutes activated,” Waterbury said.
After four weeks, do the exercises three times a week, preferably before a strength workout that includes squats, deadlifts, lunges, or other movements that use your glutes in coordinated action with other lower-body muscles.
You can also do more advanced versions of the exercises, as Waterbury demonstrated in this video.
What matters most, he emphasized, is that you make these isometric holds a permanent part of your fitness routine.
“Too many things we do throughout the day make your glutes want to shut down again,” he said.
Ultimately – and this is pretty good life wisdom – it’s a lot easier to keep your butt alive and well than it is to bring it back from the dead.
Coventry, UK – November 10, 2025 – PRESSADVANTAGE –
Strongway Gym Supplies has announced the availability of its new multi-home gym exercise packages, developed to provide users across the United Kingdom with complete training solutions for home fitness. The company stated that the new range brings together a selection of strength and conditioning equipment designed to accommodate both compact living spaces and larger dedicated setups. This update aligns with the growing demand for integrated systems that offer a balance between versatility, durability, and convenience.
According to Strongway, the newly available packages have been designed following feedback from customers who sought to combine the functionality of a full gym with the practicality of home use. Each setup is assembled from the company’s existing strength and cardio equipment, providing customers with a cohesive set of tools for developing endurance, flexibility, and muscle conditioning. Further information about Strongway’s home fitness range is available at: https://strongway.co.uk/collections/home-fitness.
Strongway confirmed that the packages include adjustable benches, multi-gyms, free weights, and supporting accessories that can be adapted to suit different exercise routines. The company said its approach has been to ensure that every product within a package integrates effectively with the others, helping users create efficient and space-conscious workout environments. The introduction of these bundles, the firm added, represents a shift towards more comprehensive and accessible fitness solutions for those seeking long-term training systems that do not compromise on quality.
Co-Director Mandip Walia commented that this announcement reflects Strongway’s commitment to expanding its offering for home users while maintaining the build standards of commercial equipment. “We’ve focused on bringing together our most popular products into packages that make sense for different training styles,” he said. “The goal has been to offer flexibility without sacrificing reliability or design integrity. People want their home gyms to perform like professional setups, and that’s the standard we continue to aim for.”
The company added that these multi-gym packages were developed with modularity in mind, allowing users to build and expand their systems over time. This approach, Strongway explained, ensures that customers can adjust their training setups as their routines evolve, reducing the need for complete replacements or costly upgrades.
By offering equipment combinations that support strength, mobility, and conditioning exercises, Strongway intends to make high-quality fitness tools more accessible to a broader audience.
The announcement also coincides with the company’s ongoing production review, which focuses on maintaining precision engineering across its equipment range. Strongway has also confirmed that it is in a continuous process of expanding its product range to support growing nationwide demand for its home gym products. More details about its bundled package deals can be found at: https://strongway.co.uk/collections/ultimate-package-deals.
Co-Director Randeep Walia added that customer input has played a significant role in shaping Strongway’s recent developments. “We’ve seen a real shift in how people approach fitness at home,” he said. “Many customers now want something that can last for years, with the option to add new equipment as they progress. These packages are designed with that in mind — adaptable, practical, and consistent in quality.”
The broader home fitness market in the UK continues to expand, driven by increased interest in personal wellness and convenience-based exercise options. Strongway’s latest product release reflects this trend, providing an adaptable framework for users who wish to establish their own home training environments. The company noted that it remains focused on balancing durability with usability, ensuring that equipment remains suitable for a variety of fitness levels.
Strongway’s latest announcement follows a series of updates to its home and commercial product lines, as the company continues to strengthen its reputation for manufacturing reliable gym systems with consistent build quality.
Strongway Gym Supplies confirmed that the new home gym packages are now available for order through its official website, with delivery options available across the United Kingdom. The company emphasised that customers can expect the same quality assurance applied across all product categories, from individual weights and bars to complete multi-station setups. Those seeking additional details about the company and its current range of fitness solutions can find more information at: https://strongway.co.uk/.
The company concluded that the release marks another step in its broader mission to make dependable, high-quality exercise systems more accessible to users at every stage of their fitness journey. By combining professional engineering standards with thoughtful design, Strongway aims to support the continued growth of home-based training environments across the country.
Readers interested in ordering home fitness products or package deals online can do so by visiting the collection links provided above.
###
For more information about Strongway Gym Supplies, contact the company here:
Strongway Gym Supplies
Mandip Walia
+44-800-001-6093
sales@strongway.co.uk
Strongway Gym Supplies, 26 The Pavilion, Coventry CV3 1QP, United Kingdom
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