Why "confidence" matters for physical activity
An important factor in making exercise feel both more appealing and manageable, and hence sustainable long-term, is confidence. But there are different ideas of what confidence is and each has more layers to it than there may appear on the surface. So in this post I will break down a specific version of confidence that research suggests is particularly impactful on motivation and long-term sustenance.
The problem with outcome confidence
I’ll start off by highlighting what I don’t mean. When I say “confidence”, I’m not necessarily talking about being confident in achieving a specific outcome or result as a consequence of your exercise efforts on one particular occasion (e.g. a time taken to run 5k, lifting a certain amount of weight for a certain number of reps). This is because if you are engaging in exercise that is physically very challenging, particularly if you are approaching the limits of your current capacities, these outcomes are not entirely under your control. Your ultimate performance here does not just depend on the stimulus you are giving your body by putting in effort, but also on a whole host of other factors you won’t be aware of.
The only things (mostly) under your control when it comes to making strength and fitness gains are the actual stimuli you provide your body with through your exercise efforts and the actions you take to maximise recovery (e.g. good sleep, nutrition and stress management). The rest is down to your body to adapt, and as I said there are many different factors that influence that adaptation that are neither in our control or even our awareness.
An important caveat - if you are doing exercise that you do not intend on being highly challenging though, for example you are performing exercise to relieve stress or get healthier, then it makes more sense to consider confidence in outcomes (e.g. “I know I can walk for 30 minutes so I will plan a 30-minute walk”).
But if you are doing the kind of exercise that is challenging you to a high degree OR you’re doing something unfamiliar, it’s impossible to be certain of exactly what result you can achieve on a single occasion. What this means is that if we focus solely on the kind of “outcome” confidence I described above, it’s necessarily going to be fragile - we can’t rely on having that feeling because our chances of achieving the specific outcome are uncertain, and no matter how much we consciously want to feel confident, the rest of our brain knows it’s uncertain. Essentially we can end up wasting energy chasing a feeling that we don’t actually need, and then frustration and self-doubt ensues because we can’t generate that feeling.
To highlight the exceptions (of which there are always some), there are a minority of people who manage to convince themselves they are capable of XYZ, and this can have a beneficial effect if you can swing it. When you truly believe you can achieve something, you’re more likely to act in ways that give you the best chance of achieving it - that’s what confidence does. So if you truly are capable of XYZ on that day you will likely pull it off.
However, most of the time you can’t just believe in your desired outcome simply because you want to - as I said, it’s fragile. Even if we do manage to blindly believe in our ability to achieve XYZ, there will come a point at which it will be actively unhelpful, because when we inevitably don’t achieve XYZ it’s then harder to make sense of and learn from because the whole premise of our efforts lacks nuance.
So for all of these reasons I would actually go as far as to say that total outcome confidence is often unjustified. This might sound negative or pessimistic but it’s not - it is reality-based, and in fact it can be liberating. It means giving up the fantasy that you “should” perform as you expect to perform, and this can be a big relief for the rigid perfectionists out there who put enormous amounts of pressure on themselves. It also frees you up to be more open to other factors affecting your performance that you weren’t aware of before, meaning you’re more in touch with reality, your approach will be better informed and ultimately your performance will be better over time.
Of course, sometimes you will achieve the result you wanted, one that makes you extremely proud or even surprises you. But on other occasions things will be inexplicably hard and your body won’t seem to perform. That’s a NORMAL part of being a human being, and it renders “outcome confidence” far too blurry a tool for navigating the fluctuations inherent to life.
Self-efficacy as an alternative
Instead, a better concept to work with is self-efficacy - the perception that you can perform the tasks and processes necessary within a workout that bring about desired progress over time. Below I will explain what this looks like, and you can use these criteria to assess your own self-efficacy.
First, you need to know what improvements you are trying to make over time by engaging in your chosen physical activities. If we don’t really know what we are aiming at long-term, it is naturally harder to trust that our efforts will bring about something meaningful to us, or to even know what we should be doing. Thus having a relatively clear long-term goal OR ongoing focus of improvement is a helpful place to start.
Secondly, you need to understand what kind of activities will help you to make those improvements. By “activities” I mean not just types of workout but particular exercises within a workout and potentially technical things like rest periods, form, tempo, etc.
Thirdly, you need to know how to meaningfully attempt these activities in a way that will trigger adaptations or progress in line with your goals, which means having the resources to help you do this (e.g. an instructor or personal trainer, knowledge about how to effectively perform an exercise, understanding of bodily cues so you can pace yourself, etc.).
Finally, you need to feel ABLE to meaningfully attempt these activities (i.e. “it is within my physical and logistical capacities to do this”). It’s no good knowing how to but feeling unable to!
Of course you could argue, as with outcome confidence, that you can never be totally sure that your estimations of all of these factors is 100% accurate, so it always helps to be open to the possibility that there are things you have missed or have yet to find out. But these things are to a much greater degree in your control, making them less permeable to feelings of pressure, and you’re unlikely to be that far off in your estimations.
To give an example, let’s say you have signed up to a Pilates class. In an ideal scenario you would…
Have a clear reason for participating in the class (e.g. you want to improve core stability to facilitate back health and lay a good foundation for strength training)
Have sufficient trust in the instructor to set out an effective series of exercises and teach you how to do them
Feel capable of following their instructions
Have enough time to make it to the class
Feel able to consistently get yourself to the class in the face of psychological barriers (e.g. stress, fatigue, self-consciousness…)
Have sufficient coordination and strength to at least attempt the moves in a way that will improve your core activation skills and muscular endurance, knowing that it isn’t just the number of reps (an outcome/result) or completion of a move that matter but the activation of muscles and motor patterns.
In other words, what’s involved in a workout needs to feel manageable and linked to a desired area of progress to you. In an ideal world it would feel like “yeah I can smash that!” but that’s not always available to us for a variety of reasons, so we can also settle with a “I can give that a meaningful go.”
Why does all this matter?
There are a variety of ways in which this concept of self-efficacy is important for successful and sustainable engagement in physical activity, which I will outline below.
1) Clarity over what you are trying to achieve and what you need to do to achieve it reduces uncertainty and therefore cognitive load. The greater the uncertainty, the greater the mental resources needed to navigate an activity like exercise, and therefore the higher the likelihood that motivation for it will waver when you’ve got lots of other things on your mind. Cognitive load (i.e. required mental resources) feeds into your sense of perceived effort, and the higher this is the harder it will be to get yourself to the activity consistently.
Equally, knowing what we need to do and anticipating some kind of positive outcome activates the dopaminergic system in our brains, which energises us towards the activity and helps us focus down on it.
2) We are biologically driven to seek opportunities to act competently and have a positive effect in an area we care about, because evolutionarily speaking such opportunities would further our survival chances. This means we evolved to experience such situations as inherently rewarding, meaning we were more likely to want to keep doing them because we have a positive emotional experience of them. So in setting ourselves up to experience improvements in and actual competence in our exercise activities, we tap into fundamental neurochemistry that makes us feel driven to keep going back.
3) Feeling that what we are attempting is manageable is important in tipping the balance in favour of being active when other factors might tip it the other way - for instance, if what you are trying to do feels only just about doable when you’re super energetic, the likelihood is it will feel not doable when you’re tired. We are constantly undergoing cost-benefit analyses of prospective activities in terms of their energy expenditure according to our physiological and psychological states, and perceived effort can increase as a consequence of this, meaning how manageable something feels can be volatile if we are pushing our limits. Just something to bear in mind if you are doing something very physically challenging - if we can enhance our self-efficacy, we reduce perceived effort and give ourselves a better chance of the cost-benefit analysis turning out in our favour.
But of course we’re not always as logical as this. For example, we can easily talk ourselves out of things, incorrectly believing we are incapable of attempting something or convincing ourselves that we just won’t be able to achieve the long-term outcomes we want. Emotions can come up that interfere with connection to our desired goals, or we can fall into perfectionistic traps of convincing ourselves that we “should” be able to attempt something that actually we can’t at the moment. Then the next relevant question is: “how do I accurately assess my competence/knowledge?” But that’s for a future post!
Chloe
Psychology of Movement
Really helpful post. Thanks Chloe