Should You Choose the Exercise Intensity You Enjoy?
Unsure how hard your workouts should feel? Explore enjoyment, intensity preferences, and choosing activity you want to return to.
Enjoyment is useful information when choosing exercise, but research does not establish one intensity that everyone will enjoy or maintain. It helps to distinguish your preferred intensity, what you can tolerate, and how the session feels during and afterward.
Preferences and habits were associated, not assigned
A cross-sectional study of 273 health-club exercisers examined enjoyment, exercise habits, intentions to continue, and exercise frequency. It also assessed agreement between participants' intensity preference and intensity tolerance.
That agreement moderated the relationships between enjoyment and the three exercise outcomes. The study did not find corresponding relevant results for disagreement between the traits. The authors suggested considering these traits when tailoring supervision and exercise prescription.
Participants completed questionnaires; they were not randomly assigned to a preferred or nonpreferred intensity. The results therefore do not prove that matching a workout to a preference causes a habit, or that an intention to continue becomes long-term attendance.
An easier-feeling option is not always the most enjoyable
A review of 20 studies involving 397 participants compared affective responses and enjoyment during and after exercise. In acute comparisons, continuous training produced more positive feelings after exercise than high-intensity intervals; the advantage was evident for moderate-intensity continuous training. The review did not find a significant difference in feelings during exercise between the modes.
Enjoyment scores, however, favored intervals over continuous training. These measures capture different experiences, so the results are not contradictory. A session may feel more pleasant immediately afterward without being rated as more enjoyable overall. There were too few longer-term studies for a meta-analysis of those comparisons.
Use preference as a question to explore
When comparing suitable sessions, note whether the intensity matches what you prefer, whether it feels tolerable, and how you feel afterward. That is a way to describe your response, not a proven formula for preventing missed workouts.
The studies support asking about experience as well as performance. They do not justify assuming that everyone should avoid hard exercise, that everyone prefers intervals, or that the most enjoyable session automatically delivers the outcome or consistency they want.