Health Behavior Theory- What Motivates You?

50 percent of people drop out of an exercise program within 3 months of starting. Yup, that’s right…50 percent. That is a very large number and the reasons why can be mystifying and numerous as anything in life. One way to better understand why people have trouble staying in a regular routine of exercise is to examine the behavioral theories associated with exercise participation.
 

The article titled “An introduction to health behavior theory” by Elsinger and Hazuga does a good job of providing insight into various health behavior theories on exercise participation. In the article they reference very well-known health behavior models such as the Trans-theoretical Model, Theory of Reasoned Action, Self-Determination Theory and Social Cognitive Theory. These theories all have solid research based background so they are excellent resources to use when talking to clients about how they can increase their exercise participation. A health behavior model that they discussed in depth was the Health Belief Model. In short, this model theorizes that people potentially exercise in order to avoid health illness. While this can be a powerful model to emphasize the importance of decreasing health risks factors, I like how the authors explained that this model can also be faulty as it can breed fear based exercise participation. We want people to exercise to be happy, healthy and balanced individuals. We don’t want exercise used as a way to promote avoidance of other issues.
 
With that being said, I thought the authors did a nice job of pointing out various health belief behaviors, but I would have liked them to go in depth on each of those models so that a compare and contrast could have been done.