Understanding Adult’s Experiences and Perceptions of How to Maintain Physical Activity: A Systematic Review and Qualitative Synthesis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Many adults do not meet physical activity recommendations for optimal health, and this is often because people find it difficult to maintain physical activity in the long term. This study focuses on identifying and synthesising factors that may influence the maintenance of physical activity in adults with and without known health conditions. METHOD: A systematic review and qualitative synthesis using thematic analysis was conducted. Four databases (MEDLINE, SPORT Discus, APA, and Web of Science) were systematically searched for studies published from inception to February 2023 that included qualitative data about people's experiences of maintaining physical activity. RESULTS: A total of 9337 abstracts were screened and 68 studies from 14 countries were included. Six main themes were identified: (1) influence of others (e.g. four forms of social support, accountability); (2) contextual and environmental influences (e.g. cost and access of physical activity, weather); (3) health-related influences (e.g. reflexivity about how physical activity improves health conditions, weight control); (4) making it work (e.g. flexibility, prioritising exercise); (5) habits; and (6) psychological processes (e.g. enjoyment, identifying as a physically active person). CONCLUSION: People who maintained their participation in physical activity found it enjoyable, prioritised it, and integrated it into their daily routine. Participants were motivated to continue being physically active when they realised the benefits for their health. Social support, in particular companion support, was a key component facilitating continued engagement. Findings specific to maintenance of physical activity included reflexivity of how physical activity benefited health, flexibility, and identifying as a physically active person.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".