Calgary Herald

It’s a good thing: Men are suckers for exercise contagion

- TOM KEENAN

Women are more influenced than men by the behaviour of their peers.

I took that propositio­n to an informal, unscientif­ic poll of friends of both genders. Most agreed that women are more likely to be influenced by the behaviour of other women than are male counterpar­ts. They cited fashion trends, group spa and shopping outings, and activity on social media.

We do have objective data on that last one. A study from the Pew Research Center found that U.S. women are 11 per cent more likely than men to use Facebook and 29 per cent more likely to be on Pinterest. On Instagram, the female lead is only seven per cent, and men are somewhat predominan­t on Twitter and LinkedIn.

However, in one important area, men are significan­tly more susceptibl­e to being influenced by their peers — working out, especially running. This phenomenon is being called “exercise contagion.” A new study from Simon Aral and Christos Nicolaides at MIT found that “exercise is contagious and that its contagious­ness varies with the relative activity of and gender relationsh­ips between friends. Less active runners influence more active runners, but not the reverse. Both men and women influence men, while only women influence other women.”

The key number from this study is that “an additional kilometre run by (your) friends influences ego (you) to run an additional 3/10th of a kilometre” Your buddies’ behaviour has similar effects on your pace of running and calories burned. There also seems to be more benefit if you compare yourselves to lower achievers than to those who excel at the chosen activity.

This whole paper is available on the Nature Communicat­ions website, and is worth a read, though to make it scholarly the authors have worked in some fancy psychologi­cal and sociologic­al theories. The take-away is that, if you want to become fitter, get some buddies together, preferably who are a bit slacker than you, and make sure you stay in close communicat­ion, since the peer effect is strongest on the same day, then tapers off with time. Those buddies can be anywhere in the world through the Internet, though I still suspect a friend in running gear knocking on your door at 5 a.m. is more persuasive than an online prod.

To me, one of the most astounding things about this research is that it was possible at all. How do you track 1.1 million individual­s running 350 million kilometres over a five-year period? Old techniques like collecting their running diaries certain wouldn’t accomplish this. Ah, but fitness monitors can. These researcher­s used data uploaded by runners to a running buddy network. I suppose a few may have cheated by tying the monitor to the dog, but by and large, fitness monitors are a lot harder to fudge than running logs.

This is one of the first major studies from an emerging area called “the quantified self.” More and more people are tracking their bodies deliberate­ly, and often continuous­ly. We are also generating incidental data on our smartphone­s from Wi-Fi sites we’ve used, and even our travel locations as recorded on our phone’s built-in GPS. We may well be sharing these with a company such as Google or Microsoft in exchange for answers to questions like, “Where did I park my car at the airport?”

Connected devices can certainly invade your privacy by disclosing personal habits. U.S. purchasers of the Bluetooth-enabled sex toy called We-Vibe recently won a class action because the company was tracking their use of the device, and even intimate details like vaginal temperatur­e, without proper disclosure.

As I’ve written before, even your ordinary fitness monitor can spill the beans if you wear it 24/7. If you’re a typical male and burn 100 calories at 2:30 a.m. while taking zero steps, your Fitbit could probably figure out what you’re up to. Since it has communicat­ion capabiliti­es, the only question is, who is it going to tell?

On the plus side, the exercise contagion study shows there is a great deal to be learned from having large groups of people track their bodies. Can the quantified self really make a person healthier? Finnish biohacker Teemu Arina thinks so, and he uses the motto Measure Yourself Better. He tracks everything from his runs to his hydration to his food intake and even his genetics, meditation­s and medication­s, with an array of apps and devices. Arina’s work is fascinatin­g, and there are some English language presentati­ons by him at tarina.me.

A final thought on the quantified self comes from a Calgary clinician that I spoke with recently. He worries about the false positives problem. If we all wore heart monitors that could alert our physicians about unusual heartbeats, there would be a lot of medically insignific­ant alerts that could swamp the system. My answer is that we’ll just have to make our devices, and the systems behind them, smart enough to sort out the data from the noise. There are plenty of companies working on doing exactly that. So whether you are a runner or not, there’s probably a quantified self in your future.

Dr. Tom Keenan is an award winning journalist, public speaker, professor in the Faculty of Environmen­tal Design at the University of Calgary, and author of the bestsellin­g book Technocree­p.

 ?? GETTY IMAGES ?? Male runners are influenced by other male runners.
GETTY IMAGES Male runners are influenced by other male runners.

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