Fitness
What really motivates people to exercise: Reddit study yields surprising insights
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In a nutshell
- Physical appearance is the top motivator for exercise (24%), outranking physical health (19%) and mental health (17%), according to analysis of Reddit discussions.
- Building consistent habits is the most effective strategy for maintaining exercise routines, with 30% of users emphasizing routine over motivation.
- During the COVID-19 pandemic, motivations shifted significantly – physical appearance became less important while health benefits gained greater prominence.
TEL AVIV — Vanity trumps health when it comes to why people start exercising. This surprising finding emerged when Tel Aviv University researchers took an unconventional approach to studying fitness motivation: they analyzed unfiltered Reddit conversations instead of using traditional surveys. Their data revealed physical appearance was the top motivation (24% of comments), with physical health (19%) and mental health (17%) trailing behind.
When it comes to sticking with exercise, building consistent habits proved most crucial, with Redditors emphasizing that discipline matters far more than fleeting motivation.
‘In reality, they want six-pack abs’
The study, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, offers a rare glimpse into what people say about exercise when they’re speaking freely, not responding to researcher-designed questions. Researchers Michal Shmueli-Scheuer, Yedidya Silverman, Israel Halperin, and Yftach Gepner analyzed 1,577 unique comments from fitness-focused and general advice Reddit communities to uncover these patterns.
Despite mountains of evidence supporting the benefits of exercise, more than 80% of adolescents and 27% of adults worldwide fail to meet the World Health Organization’s minimum activity guidelines. This persistent gap between knowing exercise is good and actually doing it drives researchers to better understand what truly gets people moving.
Traditional research on exercise motivation typically relies on questionnaires and structured interviews. While these approaches yield valuable data, they come with blind spots. Study participants represent a self-selected group — people already interested enough in exercise to volunteer for research. Scientists call this “volunteer bias,” meaning participants often differ from the general population in key ways.
Questionnaires can also subtly influence responses. The phrasing might confuse participants or nudge them toward certain answers. People may give what they think are socially acceptable answers or try to guess what researchers want to hear, a phenomenon known as “demand characteristics.”
“Our findings are not based on self-reporting, a representative sample, a questionnaire, or a survey. This is, in plain terms, the real reason why people exercise. And the answer is that people mainly exercise to look good,” explains Prof. Gepner in a statement. “In questionnaires, people claim they want to be healthy, but in reality, they want six-pack abs. These findings are important because they teach us how to address the public, how to persuade people to get off the couch, promote health, and prevent disease.”
When it comes to exercise, some need than motivation
By turning to Reddit, the Tel Aviv team gained access to conversations happening naturally, without research prompts. Reddit’s anonymity likely encourages more candid sharing, as users don’t worry about judgment from people who know them personally.
They analyzed comments from six different subreddits: r/bodyweightfitness, r/crossfit, r/Fitness, r/askMen, r/askWomen, and r/askReddit. Using natural language processing, they categorized discussions into two main themes: reasons for starting exercise and tactics for maintaining exercise routines.
Beyond the top three motivational factors (appearance, physical health, and mental health), the analysis revealed seven key strategies people use to stick with exercise. Habit formation dominated at 30%, followed by goal setting (14%), choosing enjoyable activities (12%), socializing (10%), using media like music or videos (9%), tracking with apps (2.8%), and financial commitment (2.5%).
Many Reddit users emphasized that motivation alone isn’t enough. As one commenter bluntly put it: “Motivation depends on emotions which are unstable. Discipline is the ability to maintain a habit even when the motivation isn’t there.”
For goal setting, commenters stressed concrete targets: “You really have to want it. If you don’t care to change or don’t have any numerical goals, you won’t last. Set some goals and really strive to meet them.”
Finding activities you genuinely enjoy was another major theme. “I hate going on runs or going to lift weights at the gym. I can’t get motivated to do that,” wrote one user. “But if I take a spin class or kickboxing or muscle endurance class I love it. It’s all about finding something you like.”
The COVID-19 pandemic shifted these priorities notably. Comparing pre-pandemic and pandemic-era comments showed physical appearance became less important (dropping from 26% to 19%), while physical and mental health grew more significant (rising from 17% to 25% and 15% to 24%, respectively). This reflects how the global health crisis reshaped priorities.
Wise redditor advice: ‘Do something fun for exercise’
The researchers also tracked which topics appeared together most frequently. Physical and mental health often showed up in the same comments, as did app monitoring and goal setting. This suggests people typically have multiple reasons for exercising and use several strategies simultaneously to stay consistent.
The team went beyond counting mentions by analyzing which topics received the most positive reception through Reddit’s upvoting system. Habit formation, physical appearance, and financial commitment weren’t just frequently discussed, they were highly valued by the community. For trainers or fitness club management, strategies emphasizing consistent habits, concrete goals, and finding genuinely enjoyable activities might prove more effective for clients than those focused mainly on health benefits.
The study also showcases social media’s potential as a research tool. Though traditional methods remain important, analyzing social media conversations captures more natural perspectives. As people increasingly share their experiences online, these platforms offer rich insights into human behavior.
In a world where sedentary lifestyles keep expanding, understanding what truly drives people to exercise becomes increasingly vital.
“It’s an astonishing phenomenon: science tells us that if we put just over two hours a week into physical activity, we can prevent 30% of diseases, improve our quality of life, and extend our lifespan; and yet, less than a quarter of the population actually does this. Why? What have we failed to see?” asks Gepner. “While we all wish our loved one’s good health on their birthday, a wish of ‘good workouts’ is quite rare… But there is a way to be healthy – by exercising. That’s why it’s crucial to understand what really motivates people to engage in physical activity and what helps them stick with it.”
The bottom line? The most effective exercise routine isn’t necessarily the scientifically optimal one — it’s the one you’ll actually do consistently. As one Redditor summed it up: “Do something fun for exercise. For example, I love basketball so I play basketball as an exercise but I still enjoy it and it doesn’t even seem like work.”
Paper Summary
Methodology
The researchers used a clever multi-step process to mine Reddit for insights about exercise motivation. They started by searching for keywords like “motivation,” “exercise,” and “sport,” initially finding 59 subreddits. They narrowed this down by removing smaller communities (under 100,000 users), non-English groups, and forums not focused on exercise motivation. This left them with six popular subreddits: three fitness-specific (r/bodyweightfitness, r/crossfit, r/Fitness) and three general advice communities (r/askMen, r/askWomen, r/askReddit).
Using Reddit’s API, they pulled comments containing motivation and exercise terms. To prevent any single prolific user from skewing results, they included only one randomly selected comment per user. After filtering out comments with just emojis, links, non-English text, or single-word responses, they had 1,577 unique comments to analyze.
Their analysis combined machine learning with human expertise in a five-step process. First, they used natural language processing to identify potential topic clusters. Then exercise science experts reviewed these clusters, suggested topic titles, and validated the categorization by independently reviewing samples. The remaining comments were automatically sorted into these topics. A second expert evaluation assessed this classification’s accuracy, with five graduate-level exercise physiology students reviewing random samples. Finally, they evaluated their classifier’s reliability using statistical metrics and expert agreement measures.
Results
The analysis revealed ten distinct topics falling into two categories: reasons to start exercising and ways to stick with it. Among motivations, physical appearance dominated at 24%, followed by physical health (19%) and mental health (17%). For adherence strategies, habit formation was the clear leader at 30%, with goal setting (14%), enjoyable activities (12%), socializing (10%), media use (9%), app monitoring (3%), and financial commitment (3%) completing the list.
The researchers dug deeper by examining how topics connected. They found physical and mental health frequently appeared together, as did strategies like app tracking and goal setting. The pre/during COVID comparison showed a notable shift from appearance toward health-focused motivations during the pandemic. When they examined which topics got the most upvotes, habit formation, physical appearance, and financial commitment received particularly positive reception from the Reddit community.
Limitations
Despite its fresh approach, the study has important limitations. The researchers lacked detailed demographic information about the commenters beyond Reddit’s general user statistics, which skew toward young, male, higher-income Americans. This makes it difficult to connect specific motivations with particular population groups.
The research questions were also relatively narrow, focusing mainly on identifying motivations and strategies rather than exploring effectiveness or adherence outcomes. And like all self-reported information, especially on anonymous platforms, there’s no way to verify how truthfully users described their experiences.
The researchers’ “data-driven” approach allowed considerable discretion during data selection and filtering, potentially introducing selection bias. They acknowledged this limitation and suggested future studies could use more standardized methods for topic classification. Additionally, the initial topic categorization was done by just one reviewer without a formal content analysis process, which might have influenced how certain topics were classified.
Discussion and Takeaways
The findings partially align with previous research while offering fresh perspectives. The three main motivations (appearance, physical health, mental health) match categories in established questionnaires like the Exercise Motivation Measurement scale, supporting both the study’s approach and traditional assessment methods.
However, the results diverge in some areas. Reddit comments rarely mentioned personal and social motivations like challenge, enjoyment, social recognition, and group belonging that often appear in standard questionnaires. This difference might stem from Reddit’s public, anonymous nature, where users may be less likely to discuss personal motivations openly.
The findings have practical applications for promoting physical activity. Knowing that habit formation, goal setting, and enjoyable activities are the most commonly mentioned strategies could shape more effective interventions. Programs that help people build consistent routines, set concrete goals, and find activities they genuinely enjoy might achieve better long-term adherence than those focused primarily on health benefits.
More broadly, the study shows the value of social media as a research tool. While traditional methods remain essential, analyzing social media captures more natural, unfiltered perspectives. This approach expands research possibilities and provides deeper insights into how people think and behave in real-world contexts.
Funding and Disclosures
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The paper doesn’t mention specific funding sources. In their acknowledgments, the researchers noted minor use of ChatGPT (version 3.5) for editing the abstract to reduce word count.
Publication Information
The study, “Analysis of Reddit Discussions on Motivational Factors for Physical Activity: Cross-Sectional Study,” was authored by Michal Shmueli-Scheuer, Yedidya Silverman, Israel Halperin, and Yftach Gepner from Tel Aviv University’s Department of Health Promotion and Sylvan Adams Sports Institute. Published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (2025, volume 27, article e54489), it’s available online under open-access at https://www.jmir.org/2025/1/e54489 with DOI: 10.2196/54489.
Fitness
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While exercise is known to improve memory, scientists have mostly studied this effect by using behavioral tests or brain imaging methods like MRIs, says Michelle Voss, PhD, one of the study’s authors, a professor, and the director of the Health, Brain, and Cognitive Lab at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.
But she says these approaches can’t precisely identify where “ripples” originate, particularly in the deep brain structures like the hippocampus, a part of the brain strongly connected to memory and learning, she says.
The current study, published in Brain Communications, recorded electrical activity directly, using surgically implanted (intracranial) electrodes. “This allowed us to observe how exercise changes the brain’s memory circuits in real time,” Dr. Voss says.
20-Minute Bursts of Exercise Increase Brain Ripples
The participants performed a 5-minute warm-up and then rode a stationary bike for 20 minutes at a pace they could maintain. Researchers recorded their brain activity before and after the biking session.
The electrodes showed an increased rate of so-called sharp-wave ripples from the hippocampus and connections with cortical regions of the brain, which are involved in learning and memory.
“Sharp-wave ripples have long been known from animal studies to play a central role in memory,” Voss says, adding that recent studies using intracranial recordings in humans also support the importance of ripples for human memory.
“Our findings are the first to show that exercise can modulate these ripple signals in the human brain,” she says.
Researchers also observed that larger increases in heart rate during exercise were associated with larger changes in ripple activity in cortical networks, Voss adds.
What’s Already Known About Exercise, Memory, and Learning
Exercise helps build connections between neurons, which deepens and strengthens brain networks, Franssen says.
Physical activity also improves metabolism, which improves insulin sensitivity, helping blood sugar regulation and giving the brain a “more stable and reliable supply of fuel,” Dr. Perlmutter says.
“This is critically important because the brain is an energy-intensive organ, consuming roughly 20 percent of the body’s energy despite representing only a small fraction of body weight,” he adds.
The Research Has Limitations
Voss says researchers were careful to “exclude signals that contained epileptic activity. However, of course, we can’t statistically control for the accumulated effects of having epilepsy on the brain.”
The exercise-brain ripple patterns observed in the current study also closely match those observed in healthy adults using noninvasive brain imaging, such as MRI, she added.
“That convergence across very different methods is one of the strongest indicators that the effects are not specific to epilepsy, but reflect a more general human brain response to exercise,” Voss said.
Researchers also didn’t directly test memory performance, Voss notes. “While hippocampal ripples are strongly linked to memory processing in decades of neuroscience research, the next step will be to measure how exercise-related changes in ripples relate to memory performance in the same individuals.”
Future studies should also compare exercise with other everyday activities, such as sitting quietly or light movement, to determine how specific these effects are to aerobic exercise at the intensity that was studied, she says.
Satisfy Your Brain’s Exercise Craving
It’s never too early or too late to start exercising for brain health, Franssen says.
People of any age, from grade-school children to people in their nineties, can benefit from increased physical activity, Perlmutter says. “My recommendation is to consider taking advantage of the connection between physical activity and brain health across the entire range of human aging.”
Any type of exercise is great, Franssen says, but especially “repetitive behaviors,” like swimming, jogging, and walking.
“Sometimes we let the hugeness of putting in a huge fitness routine get in our way,” she says. “Having a little exercise snack every so often is also very important to improving cognition.”
Increasing our level of physical fitness leads to a bigger release of brain-boosting proteins following one session of exercise, a new study led by a UCL researcher has found.
The study, published in Brain Research, took a group of inactive unfit participants through a 12-week training programme of cycling three times per week and made them fitter. Researchers found as their fitness increased, so did the amount of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) released following exercise, resulting in improved brain function.
Just 15 minutes of moderate to vigorous aerobic exercise releases BDNF, a brain protein which is known to support the formation of new neurons and new synapses (connections between brain cells), and maintains the health of existing neurons. This is the first study to show that for unfit people, just 12 weeks of consistent training can boost the brain’s response to a single 15-minute workout.
The study, led by Dr Flaminia Ronca (UCL Surgery & Interventional Science, and the Institute of Sport, Exercise and Health), involved 30 participants – 23 male and seven female – taking part in the 12-week programme. To assess fitness levels throughout the programme, participants completed VO2max tests every six weeks, which measures the maximum rate of oxygen your body can consume and use during intense exercise.
BDNF levels were measured pre- and post-VO2max testing, alongside a series of cognitive and memory tests, while also measuring changes in brain activity in the prefrontal cortex – where executive functions such as decision-making, emotion regulation, attention and impulsivity are controlled.
By the final week of the trial, results showed that baseline levels of BDNF did not change, but participants did show a larger spike of BDNF following intense exercise, compared to how their brains responded to intense exercise before the 12-week programme. This was linked to improvements in VO2max (aerobic fitness).
Higher overall BDNF levels and stronger exercise-induced increases were also associated with changes in activity across key areas of the prefrontal cortex during attention and inhibition tasks, though not during memory tasks.
Overall, the results showed that increasing physical fitness can enhance the brain’s ability to produce BDNF in response to acute bouts of exercise, which can have a strong positive influence on neural activity.
Lead author Dr Flaminia Ronca said: “We’ve known for a while that exercise is good for our brain, but the mechanisms through which this occurs are still being disentangled. The most exciting finding from our study is that if we become fitter, our brains benefit even more from a single session of exercise, and this can change in only six weeks.”
Notes to editors:
For more information or to speak to the researchers involved, please contact: Tom Cramp, UCL Media Relations , T: +447586 711698, E: [email protected]
The research paper: ‘BDNF relates to prefrontal cortex activity in the context of physical exercise’, Flaminia Ronca, Cian Xu, Ellen Kong, Dennis Chan, Antonia Hamilton, Giampietro Schiavo, Ilias Tachtsidis, Paola Pinti, Benjamin Tari, Tom Gurney, Paul W. Burgess, is published in Brain Research, March 2026,
About UCL (University College London)
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Journal
Brain Research
DOI
10.1016/j.brainres.2026.150253
Method of Research
Experimental study
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
BDNF relates to prefrontal cortex activity in the context of physical exercise
Article Publication Date
4-Mar-2026
Media Contact
Tom Cramp
University College London
[email protected]
Journal
Brain Research
DOI
10.1016/j.brainres.2026.150253
Journal
Brain Research
DOI
10.1016/j.brainres.2026.150253
Method of Research
Experimental study
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
BDNF relates to prefrontal cortex activity in the context of physical exercise
Article Publication Date
4-Mar-2026
Tags
/Health and medicine/Human health/Physical exercise
bu içeriği en az 2000 kelime olacak şekilde ve alt başlıklar ve madde içermiyecek şekilde ünlü bir science magazine için İngilizce olarak yeniden yaz. Teknik açıklamalar içersin ve viral olacak şekilde İngilizce yaz. Haber dışında başka bir şey içermesin. Haber içerisinde en az 12 paragraf ve her bir paragrafta da en az 50 kelime olsun. Cevapta sadece haber olsun. Ayrıca haberi yazdıktan sonra içerikten yararlanarak aşağıdaki başlıkların bilgisi var ise haberin altında doldur. Eğer yoksa bilgisi ilgili kısmı yazma.:
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Keywords
Tags: 12-week cycling training program benefitsbrain plasticity and physical fitnessbrain-derived neurotrophic factor after exerciseeffects of aerobic exercise on BDNFexercise and neuron healthexercise-induced neurogenesisfitness level impact on brain proteinsfitness training for cognitive improvementimproving brain function through fitnessmoderate to vigorous aerobic exercise effectsphysical fitness and brain healthVO2max and brain function correlation
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