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 In an experiment, researchers gave 94 older adults daily walking
goals and pedometers to track their progress. They randomly sorted
participants into four groups to get different types of weekly
motivation for meeting the walking goals: $20 to keep for
themselves, $20 to donate to a charity of their choice, $20 to keep
or donate or a control group that got no cash at all.
During the 16-week experiment, people who had the chance to get cash
were more than three times as likely to meet daily walking goals as
the group that had no way to win money, the study found.
Over another 16 weeks of follow-up after payments ended, however,
there wasn’t a meaningful difference between the groups in how often
people met their walking goals.
“I think that people don't continue their changed behavior of
walking more because they are not getting that immediate incentive
or reinforcement from the money,” said senior study author Karen
Glanz, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania in
Philadelphia.
“We've seen that, in order to maintain behavior change, people have
to ‘internalize’ the reward – that could be by focusing on how
walking more makes them feel better, such as having more energy or
easier everyday activities, or helps them get off medication,” Glanz
added by email.
Adults should get at least 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous
physical activity a week, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention.
All of the people in the study lived in retirement communities, and
they were 80 years old on average.
At the start of the study, they walked an average of 4,556 steps a
day. This amounts to a bit more than two miles at a comfortable pace
for most people, and might take a total of 30 to 40 minutes to
complete.
Every participant had the same daily goal – to walk 50 percent more
than they did at the beginning of the experiment. This translated
into a daily goal of about 6,379 steps on average, or more than
three miles, extending walking time to about 45 to 60 minutes.
Both financial incentives and opportunity to donate to charity
increased walking, by 2,348 steps and 2,562 steps per day,
respectfully, researchers report in the American Journal of
Preventive Medicine.
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There wasn’t a statistically meaningful difference in the number of
days people met goals based on the type of financial incentive they
could get.
After the payouts went away, all of the groups that had been offered
money walked less, dropping down to about the same level seen in the
control group that didn’t have a chance to win money.
The study was small, making it hard to spot statistically meaningful
differences among the groups, the authors note. The experiment was
also too short to see how payouts might influence long-term changes
in physical activity levels.
Financial incentives may work well to trigger motivation and to
increase walking during the time they are handed out, said Dr. Per
Ladenvall, a researcher at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden
who wasn’t involved in the study. Long-term behavior change,
however, may require counseling or other efforts to motivate people
to stick with their exercise programs, Ladenvall said by email.
“I think financial incentives can serve a purpose of helping people
increase their physical activity over a short-term,” said Lucas
Carr, a physiology researcher at the University of Iowa in Iowa City
who wasn’t involved in the study.
“In terms of maintaining activity long-term, I think we need to
focus on designing work, school and neighborhood environments that
sustainably nudge everyone to be more active,” Carr added by email.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2jLy5Tz American Journal of Preventive
Medicine, online January 3, 2017.
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