Yoga, Zumba or HIIT? The best way to exercise, based on your personality type

Curating your fitness routine to better match your personality could help you get the most out of your workouts, a new study shows.

The paper, published last month in Frontiers in Psychology, shows that certain personality traits may indicate which type of exercises people enjoy and how likely they are to stick with them.

“We found that our personality can influence how we engage with exercise, and particularly which forms of exercise we enjoy the most,” Flaminia Ronca, one of the study’s co-authors and an associate professor at University College London, said in a press release.

“It’s OK if we don’t enjoy a particular session,” Ronca said. “We can try something else.”

Ronca and her fellow researchers recruited 132 adults, and placed them into two groups. One group was told to follow at-home workouts of cycling and strength training, and the other group was asked to follow their usual routines.

Participants were given a questionnaire to determine their personality type and stress levels. By the end of the study, a total of 86 participants completed their group’s assignment and surveys which asked which workouts they enjoyed the most before and after the experiment began.

The paper focused on the Big Five personality traits used in psychology:

• Extraversion
• Agreeableness
• Conscientiousness
• Emotional stability (neuroticism)
• Openness

Here are the workouts that each personality type found the most exciting.