Schedule Intervention to Increase Sustainable Walking Activity in Midlife Working Adults

Overview

While people commonly understand that regular physical exercise conveys many health benefits, only 20% of U.S. adults take regular exercise and they have difficulty maintaining new healthy behaviors. The goal of this study is to use a planning intervention to help establish and maintain a daily step regimen in working midlife adults. The investigators will ask participants to plan when, where, and how to act on a daily walking goal in conjunction with a scheduling intervention to increase the chances that they will maintain this new regimen. The effectiveness of three different scheduling interventions will be compared.

While people commonly understand that regular physical exercise conveys many health benefits, only 20% of U.S. adults take regular exercise and they have difficulty maintaining new healthy behaviors. The goal of this study is to use a planning intervention to help establish and maintain a daily step regimen in working midlife adults. The investigators will ask participants to plan when, where, and how to act on a daily walking goal in conjunction with a scheduling intervention to increase the chances that they will maintain this new regimen. Participants will be randomly assigned to one of three conditions: consistent schedule, inconsistent schedule, no schedule. All participants will be provided with an accelerometer to measure their daily activity and as a behavioral support for our intervention and they will be given a step goal. The goal given to each individual will be to increase immediately their daily steps to a level based on recommended guidelines (e.g., Hill, Wyatt, Reed, and Peters, 2003). The investigators will test which version of the scheduling intervention is most successful for increasing and maintaining step counts. It is predicted that participants in the consistent schedule condition will increase their step count more than those participants in the no schedule control condition, and that they will maintain this activity for a longer period after the intervention period is complete than those participants in the inconsistent schedule condition.