Matching your workouts to your personality could make exercise more enjoyable and give better results

Making exercise fun is the holy grail for many people who can’t quite find the motivation to work out.

But rather than forcing yourself to enjoy running or that gym class you once attended, the solution may lie in something more straightforward — simply matching a workout to your personality type, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

That’s because people with different personality traits enjoy different types of exercise, the study found.

More extroverted people, for example, prefer high-intensity training sessions with others, such as team sports, while people who scored highly on “neuroticism,” a metric that measures someone’s emotional instability, preferred private workouts without people watching them and punctuated by short breaks.

As for those who scored highly on conscientiousness, they “were more likely to have a well-rounded fitness … and we think that’s because conscientious individuals are more likely to be driven by the fact that exercise is good for them,” said the study’s co-lead author, Flaminia Ronca, an associate professor in exercise science at University College London.