By Gina DeMillo Wagner, Experience Life

Understanding the nature of your personality comes in handy for landing the perfect job or fine-tuning your communication skills with your partner. But did you ever consider the role your personality type plays in determining your fitness tastes?

Think about it: Would you prefer swimming laps solo over attending a rowdy group-cycling class? Would you rather take a samba class or an uphill nature walk, or put in 45 minutes on a treadmill? Do you feel better about exercising with a fitness buddy or going it alone? Your answers to these questions probably have less to do with your physical characteristics than they do with how you’re wired — socially, emotionally and psychologically.

“Understanding these nuances and tailoring your fitness regimen accordingly give you a major head start on the path to success,” says Suzanne Brue, MS, a longtime Myers-Briggs practitioner and author of The 8 Colors of Fitness (Oakledge Press, 2008).

This may sound like the equivalent of a fitness horoscope to you — potentially more fun than functional — but matching activities to personality type has been shown to have real-world relevance, even for those cynical about the whole personality-typing concept.

“Research suggests that people who engage in personality-appropriate activities will stick with the activities longer, enjoy their workout more and ultimately have a greater overall fitness experience,” says Susan Davis-Ali, PhD, a researcher who developed a fitness interest profile test for Life Time Fitness. (Take Davis-Ali’s quiz at www.lifetimefitness.com/fip.)

Plus, discovering your fitness personality can save you time and trouble, Davis-Ali adds, because you can proceed directly toward activities you’re likely to find rewarding and avoid false starts with fitness fads that just aren’t for you. (For more on maximizing fitness enjoyment, see “Welcome to the Fitness Revolution” in the October 2008 archives.)

Though not the first to dig into the topic of fitness and personality, Brue is the first to create a system based on the principles of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment. Brue took the MBTIs — Introversion (I) or Extraversion (E), Intuition (N) or Sensing (S), Thinking (T) or Feeling (F), and Judging (J) or Perceiving (P) — and reworked them into an easily maneuverable color-coded fitness personality model.

Next: Get to Know Yourself