Apparently, You Can’t Pay People To Go To The Gym

There are a lot of things that we would do if offered the right amount of money. Eat a snail, jump off the high board and maybe even climb a mountain – however, heading to the gym for a workout isn’t one of them.

According to new research, cash just doesn’t cut it when trying to encourage people to go to the gym. The study, conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research, looked at 836 new gym members and split them into four groups to test how successful incentivized gym attendance was.

The first control group was offered $30 unconditionally while the other three were given the choice between $30, $60 or an item of their choosing worth $30 if they managed to attend the gym nine times in a six-week span.

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Surprisingly, those who were incentivized only had a marginal increased in attendance when compared to the control group. It also only had an impact on the first six weeks as the last four weeks saw those three groups dropping their gym attendance down to just once a week.

Of course, the incentive in this study was very modest in comparison to other studies out there. If the stakes were raised, perhaps more would be inclined to get up and start squatting.