What we gain by exercising together

(Sound of walking, leaves crunching)

Emily Harris: It’s still dark out as I walk to Central Park on a Thursday morning to meet up with the Central Park Running Club.

(Members of Central Park Running Club chatting in the background)

Mike Black: We always meet at 6:30 at the boathouse.

Emily Harris: That’s 6:30 a.m. You might be asking: “What’s so enticing about exercising together that it drags people out of bed in the wee hours of the morning and pushes them to show up even when the thermostat drops?” That’s exactly what I came here to find out.

Mike Black: My name is Mike Black. And I had only run with a group once, and it was probably about eight years ago. But then a few months ago, I was looking to just meet new people in the area and I started looking at running groups and came across this group and it just had a whole different kind of vibe that I really enjoyed.

Emily Harris: Mike told me about a workout the team had done earlier that week.

Mike Black: We did, this morning, a loop of the reservoir and a loop of the bridle path. And it was supposed to be like a marathon tune up. So a little faster than your marathon pace. And (laughing) we were going a lot faster than our marathon paces. And it felt like we were all kind of pushing each other and we were all really in sync. There was a certain rhythm to it.

Emily Harris: The rewarding feeling Mike and his teammates had of being in a rhythm together has a name: team flow.

Mohammad Shehata: I’m Mohammad Shehata.

 Emily Harris: Dr. Shehata is a neuroscientist from Toyohashi University in Japan who is a visiting professor right now at Caltech. He’s among the first to study the neuroscience behind team flow.

Mohammad Shehata: It’s very hard to do this in a lab.

Emily Harris: First, he had to find an activity that put people in a team flow state. To do that, he turned to the gaming industry.

(Electric guitar riff plays) 

Emily Harris: Dr. Shehata had a Ph.D. student at the time who liked playing Guitar Hero on her phone. The first time he saw her playing it, he said:

Mohammad Shehata: “Well, what is this? This looks like a guitar hero with a very simplified way.” 

Emily Harris: Dr. Shehata and his group ended up using a phone version of something like Guitar Hero to get their study participants into a team flow state. 

(Guitar riff continues playing)

Pairs of participants sat and tapped two different patterns together on an iPad — like you’d do if you were playing Guitar Hero with your friend. They had to keep their heads very still while they were playing, though, because Dr. Shehata had placed sticky sensors on their heads and was recording their patterns of brain activity as they played. So, what did they find?

Mohammad Shehata: People already know that teams versus solos have enhanced synchrony. But here, if you have team flow, you have even further enhanced synchrony.

Emily Harris: And what’s neural synchrony?

Mohammad Shehata: If we were walking together on a street next to each other, and then our footsteps start to kind of, like, match each other in walking, it’s kind of like the same concept in the neurons when the neurons start to also match the firing pattern.

Emily Harris: Some researchers think that neural synchrony might be part of what underlies our more subjective feelings of closeness with others. So, why does Dr. Shehata think they saw this increase in neural synchrony?

Mohammad Shehata: You can be motivated by reward. I give you some reward and based on the money or incentives that I give you, you become more motivated. But there is another thing that’s called intrinsic motivation. I give you nothing. But still you’re very motivated, because you like the outcome.

Emily Harris: Intrinsic motivation came up, too, when I was talking with Alison Phillips, a health psychologist at Iowa State University who studies how to promote and maintain health behaviors — like exercise!

Alison Phillips: An open question is can we pay people, for example, to exercise? And is that enough of a reward, that it will become a habit? And my answer to you based on my research is that’s not good enough. It should be an intrinsic reward. 

Emily Harris: I asked her whether she thought group exercise might fit the “intrinsically rewarding” bill.

Alison Phillips: So, intrinsic motivation is motivation to engage in a behavior because you want to, because it’s inherently enjoyable. Working out in a group, when you identify with that group, so you feel a sense of cohesion, you satisfy a psychological need of relatedness. That is inherently rewarding. 

Emily Harris: If you’re wondering how to set your team up to be in a position for the perhaps intrinsically-rewarding team flow, Dr. Shehata says there are five big, defining characteristics. 

Mohammad Shehata: The first thing is that common purpose.

Emily Harris: The other four are complementary skills, clear performance goals, strong commitment and mutual accountability. When you have all those things, it’s a pretty good bet that you’ll be able to slip into this state of team flow. 

(Central Park Running Club members chat in the background.)

So does Central Park Running Club check off these five boxes for team flow? I asked Allison Lind Wiedman, one of the coaches for the Central Park Running Club and a physical therapist in New York City, why she thinks people are drawn to exercising together.

Allison Lind Wiedman: Well, number one, it’s motivation, right? It gets you out of bed, it gets you going in the morning, the accountability of seeing everyone.

Emily Harris: Accountability, check. Next up, common purpose.

Allison Lind Wiedman: The socialization, like humans are social creatures — we’re pack creatures. So finding people that have something in common with you.

Emily Harris: Common purpose, check. Third on Dr. Shehata’s list: clear performance goals.

Mike Black: Like there are people who have very specific goals. A lot of people in our group are training for the New York City Marathon.

Emily Harris: Performance goals, check. Next, strong commitment.

(Dave talks to the big group of runners before the run.)

Dave: So pumped to have everyone out here, I have to use my loud hands. There are so many people here.

Emily Harris: That was Dave, another of the Central Park Running Club coaches, talking to 25 runners before they set off on their morning run around the park. 

(CPRC members cheer)

Emily Harris: He was telling them to give themselves a round of applause for waking up early to make it to the morning practice at 6:30. Strong commitment? 6:30 a.m.? Check. Last team flow box to check: complementary skills. Back to Mike.

Mike Black: People show up for specific workouts too. Some people, you see them a lot at long runs. Some people you always see them at speed workouts. And then there’s the fun run is a Thursday run, which is the original. Those tend to be the biggest turnout and some people just come for those.

Emily Harris: Some people who are really good at distance, others who excel at the fast stuff and some people who prioritize the enjoyment of being active. Seems like complementary skills to me. Check.

(Subtly upbeat music fades in.)

Emily Harris: At the height of COVID, when lots of people were spending more time alone than they had before, we didn’t have as many opportunities to experience team flow — in work or in play. When restrictions on gathering outside lifted, it seemed like lots of people leapt at the chance to exercise outside together. Gyms set up outdoor Zumba sessions, yogis laid their mats out on grass rather than hard studio floors, people jumped around in the park together doing high intensity cardio. While it’s not entirely surprising that we craved togetherness after so much time apart, we don’t just like exercising together because it’s social. There is something special that happens in our minds when we exercise on teams. 

For Scienceline, I’m Emily Harris.