People who are offered an element of competition as part of their exercise regime are much more likely to achieve positive results than those relying purely on “positive encouragement”.

That is the headline finding from a new study by Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, US.

The study, which studied the behaviours of 800 people who signed up for an 11-week exercise programme, also found that offering people friendly support actually made them less likely to go to the gym. Results showed that those left to their own devices were more likely to attend exercise sessions than those given a network of supportive voices.

For the study, 800 people – students and staff at the university – were offered weekly exercise and gym classes at the university's health club, a programme of fitness mentoring and nutritional advice.

Researchers split the participants into four groups – individual competition, team support, team competition, and a control group – to test how different kinds of social networks affected their exercise levels.

Each group was promised rewards for attending classes.

In the individual group, participants could see exercise leaderboards listing anonymous programme members and earned prizes based on their own, personal success attending classes.

Members of the “team support” group were given instructions to chat online and encourage team members to exercise, with rewards going to the most successful teams with the most class attendance.

Meanwhile, those in the team competition group could see a leaderboard of other teams and their team standing.

Participants in the control group could use the website and go to any class, but were not given any social connections on the website; prizes in this group were based on individual success taking classes.

Overwhelmingly, competition motivated participants to exercise the most, with attendance rates 90 per cent higher in the competitive groups than in the control group.

Both team and individual competition drove the students to work out, with participants in the former taking a mean of 38.5 classes a week and those in the latter taking 35.7. Members of the control group went to the gym far less often, on average 20.3 times a week.

The members of the team support group, however, performed worse even than the control group – just 16.8 classes a week on average — which is less than half the exercise rate of the competitive groups.

Dr Jingwen Zhang, who led the project alongside Damon Centola, said: “Framing the social interaction as a competition can create positive social norms for exercising.

“Social support can make people more dependent on receiving messages, which can change the focus of the programme.”

“Supportive groups can backfire because they draw attention to members who are less active, which can create a downward spiral of participation.

“Competitive groups frame relationships in terms of goal-setting by the most active members. These relationships help to motivate exercise because they give people higher expectations for their own levels of performance.”

To read the report and its findings in full, click here.