Male anxiety affecting exercise habits
By Michal Tellos
News Editor
March 31, 2010
 Karen Maini, a master’s student in the human kinetics faculty, is examining men with exercise anxiety. No, she isn’t staring them down to make them more nervous, she’s studying them to see what can be done to combat the anxiety.
Maini and her team of professor-advisors, UWindsor’s Krista Brock and Brock University’s Kimberley Gammage, identified five facets of male anxiety toward lifting weights: someone hovering over them waiting to use equipment, someone commenting on their appearance, difficulty with lifting a certain amount of weight, having their form corrected by a trainer, and exercising in the presence of an attractive female.
“Manipulation of these conditions proved to affect the level of anxiety.
We manipulated these 5 aspects differently for 2 groups in order to influence how anxious they felt. For example, one group had a female trainer and were told they had to lift an unrealistic amount of weight,” said Maini.
“Results thus far indicate that these manipulations result in higher levels of anxiety than the other group who for example, only had to lift a minimum amount of weight and did not have a female trainer present,” she added.
Importantly, anxiety does not only stem from how a male physically appears, but also from the impression he feels he is giving to observers, which includes whether or not they look fit, strong, or coordinated, among others.
Maini hopes that this study, which is part of her thesis, will help inspire other studies like it, ultimately resulting in some sort of action.
“We hope that this research will spark other studies of a similar nature so that interventions can be developed to reduce men’s anxiety in the weight room. Much like gyms have adopted women’s only fitness areas, we hope to determine what can be done to reduce anxiety for men and encourage exercise participation,” she said.
Exercise is constantly becoming more important in Canada.
In 2005, the federal government released a study regarding obesity in Canada, and the results stated that the population is obese enough to call it an epidemic.
Obesity has been on the rise in North American for the last two decades, and, according to a 2004 Canadian community health survey conducted by Statistics Canada, 23.1 per cent of Canadian over the age of 18 classify as obese.
The body mass index, (BMI), defines an individual as obese when their BMI exceeds 30kg/m squared, and overweight if it is higher than 25.
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