An Exploration of Social Requirements for Exercise Group Formation

Summary:
In this article, Mike Wu, Abhishek Ranjan, and Khai N. Truong (all from the University of Toronto) explain their findings on how people find exercise partners. They used an online survey of 96 people, followed by two focus groups of 12 people. The authors wanted to find out which characteristics of working out with others could be translated into the design of applications and websites devoted to bringing people together for exercise. Their results can be broken down into the following:

• Most people have or look for exercise partners
• People generally know their partner prior to working out
• Most people will not exercise alone
• People are willing to share different information to find partners (figure 1)
  
  

From these findings, the authors suggest that social networks geared towards helping people find exercise partners should have a few characteristics. First, they must allow people to collaborate about what they like and when they are available. Second, users should be allowed to update their available times constantly, instead of setting rigid schedules on calendars.Third, users should be able to vary what personal information they share with other people in the network. And finally, users should be able to choose their partners based on familiarity instead of being matched with strangers.

Figure 1. How willing people are to share information

Discussion:
I found this study to be interesting and true. I know that I have a hard time making myself go to the Rec unless someone is going with me. Even then, it takes a while to hash out schedules and communicate times. Generally, it's texting that gets everyone together, so having a mobile application based on these findings would be useful and practical. I would expect that to soon be developed as future work (the author's expect it, too). I wonder if the findings would be different for Americans over Canadians...