New Megastudy Identifies Dozens of Ways to Boost Exercise

Navigating the treat-filled holiday season is challenging, but the new year brings opportunities to make improvements to your daily routine - hence the shiny, new gym membership. Unfortunately, resolutions are often short lived. While numerous studies have tried to identify the silver bullet to get people to make long-lasting change in their exercise routines, most interventions have had little success. A group of researchers from multiple institutions, including five from Carnegie Mellon University, have taken a different approach to this problem. Through the University of Pennsylvania's Behavior Change for Good Initiative , they decided to forgo a single, stand-alone study and opted for one massive project that includes thousands of participants. This megastudy was set at one field site, 24 Hour Fitness, and recruited 61,293 participants from the organization's membership. The participants were randomly put into different treatments, or arms, of the study.