By Paul Burghardt, PhD

Here’s one for the notebook. People who exercise regularly obtain greater elevation in mood following a single exercise session compared to people who don’t exercise regularly. This was revealed in a recent study by Hoffman & Hoffman (2008) in the Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.

What?! Who?!?! How?!?!?…. It just doesn’t seem fair. Isn’t exercise supposed to elevate mood for everyone!?!?

At this point, you might be saying to yourself, “There’s no point in starting an exercise program, you only get improvements in mood if you exercise regularly.” Easy there Debbie Downer, there are still plenty of reasons to increase your physical activity or start exercising.

Digression Alert!

For those of you who are unfamiliar, Debbie Downer is a character from a Saturday Night Live skit. She could transform anything that anyone said into a completely depressing anecdote. Debbie was not just a ‘glass half empty’ type of person, she was a ‘dirty glass is a three-quarters empty and it dropped and broke on the floor’ type of person. Your can follow this link to check her out. If for no other reason than it is one of the rare occasions on SNL when the cast has a difficult time ‘keeping it together.’

Back to the Science!

To recap, we were talking about how it was unfair that people who exercise regularly experience a greater elevation in mood after a single session of exercise than people who don’t exercise.

There was a couple of interesting things about this study. First, this study looked at people who were, on average, in their early 40’s. It isn’t uncommon for these types of studies to look at college-age kids or people that are in the autumn of their lives. So this snap shot of the middle portion in life is pretty interesting.

Second, this study required people from each group to exercise at the same level of perceived exertion. Everyone performed a warm-up that felt very light, and then ran on the treadmill for 20 minutes at a pace that felt somewhat difficult. An important issue to note is that those who exercised regularly were likely working at a higher absolute intensity compared to people who were sedentary. For example, regular exercisers might warm up at a pace of 4 miles per hour, whereas the sedentary people may have warmed up at 2 miles per hour…but it felt the same to both groups.

This is the main idea behind perceived exertion. There are several tools, questionnaires really, available to measure how difficult exercise feels to an individual. A commonly used scale for exercise is the Borg-scale which measures 6-20. A perceived exertion of 6 would feel like the person was resting comfortably. A perceived exertion of 20 would be a scenario where the person would feel like they are working as hard as they possibly could; for example sprinting uphill. What is really cool about this scale is that you can often match the person’s subjective verbal rating of exertion to an objective measure of heart rate.

What do I mean? Basically you take their reported exertion score on the Borg-scale, let’s say 12, and multiply it by 10 to get the person’s heart rate; in this case 120 beats-per-minute. When researchers do that, they’re typically not that far off from the heart rate actually measured.

Now you might be thinking, “hey, Debbie has a point, if I don’t exercise regularly, then why start? I won’t get anything from it.” Well that’s not true. This study showed that people who exercise regularly obtained a greater enhancement of mood following a single bout of exercise compared to those who don’t exercise regularly. But, those who didn’t exercise regularly still experienced an improvement in mood following a single exercise session.

So you can be an ultra-marathoner, a regular exerciser, or a couch potato and still experience some elevation of your mood after a single session of exercise. The thing you need to realize is that you’ll feel even better if you can make exercise a normal part of your routine. However, is that improvement in mood enough motivation for sedentary people?

The authors of this article raise this very interesting point. Namely, that the elevation in mood experienced by sedentary individuals after a single exercise session may not be substantial enough to surpass that experienced by less healthy activities. To translate, you might get more of a temporary elevation in mood from sitting on the couch eating potato chips and watching TV than if you go out for a walk. That is to say, if you are just starting to incorporate exercise into your daily routine.

This is where it helps to have some foresight and look to the future. You will continually build on your past efforts, your previous investments so to speak. As you develop your physical reserve it pays out larger dividends. It’s very similar to compound interest. The more you save, the more you have available to earn interest on partially due to what you put in, and partially due to what is paid back into your account by your own investment.

An interesting parallel to the benefits of building up a ‘physical’ bank account is the ability to withdraw from what you have accrued. If we’ve built up sufficient savings in our account, for a rainy-day, we’ll be better able to handle the unexpected challenges that life inevitably will through our way. Just remember, it takes some time to build a big enough bank account that you can take vacation for a month.

Hopefully, this information will give you some extra motivation to make it through the initial weeks when first starting an exercise program. I know it’s can be difficult to maintain in the beginning. However, it appears that if you can maintain it you will be rewarded. So take heart, it will get easier and ultimately make you feel better.