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What if everyone liked to exercise and did it regularly? Individual and collective health would improve, along with the staggering health costs involved in chronic diseases due to sedentary behavior.

Alas, such is not the case. At last count, only 28 percent of Americans are getting the recommended 150 minutes of cardiovascular exercise and two sessions of strength training per week.

Some anthropologists point out that it is not our fault. We evolved successfully because humans learned early on that conserving calories was important. That’s because they never knew when the next bout of calories was going to come along. And, hunting and gathering was hard work. Once the work stopped, it was time to conserve energy. Learning to do that was key to survival. So, you could say that our tendency to enjoy being sedentary comes naturally.

Now, of course, we have different problems. We have lots of enticing distractions that keep us sitting down and easy access to calories of all sorts. Our evolutionary tendency may be kicking in to help us enjoy a life of ease, and our environment conspires to help us with that.

What can help to get us moving? Are we doomed to play out this calorie-conserving scenario to our detriment?

Flow May Provide an Answer

An interesting counter argument comes to us from Wesson and Boniwell (2007). Their research is about flow theory and its relevance to coaching psychology. Flow theory was developed Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1970s. He wanted to understand why people could become committed to an activity that........

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