Science1 publisher3 min readPublished
Couples who exercise together report better communication in a BYU survey of nearly 1,700 marriages
BYU researchers found that among nearly 1,700 young married couples, those who exercised together reported better communication and less marital stress. The answers are self-reported associations, so a shared walk is cheap to try but unproven as a cause.
The Scientist · Science desk
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What happened
- Jeremy Yorgason, a professor in BYU's School of Family Life, led the study, which was published in Family Relations; his co-author was Ashlyn Hiatt Mildenhall.
- The couples were drawn from CREATE, a nationally representative BYU project that has followed newly married couples across the United States for more than a decade.
- Exercising alone was also associated with healthier marriages, but exercise done as a couple consistently showed the stronger links.
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Why it matters
- contradiction Yorgason takes the consistency of the link as a sign that shared exercise is influencing relationships, a causal step that self-reported associations from one survey cannot support by themselves.
- constraint Counsellors cannot turn the result into a prescription such as walks per week, because a small association in survey answers does not say how much change a given amount of shared exercise produces.
- decision For a couple deciding whether to try it, the money cost is close to zero since walking was the commonest shared activity; the real cost is time, which falls hardest on parents of young children.
All of the study's data come from the couples themselves. Exercise habits and the three relationship measures were all survey answers [6][8], so the same people supplied both sides of each correlation. A design like this cannot say which way the link runs. Spouses who already get along may simply be more willing to spend an hour walking side by side, and that alone would produce the pattern. The release does not include effect sizes or say whether the analysis followed couples across CREATE's years of follow-up [7] or compared them at a single point.
Comparing joint exercisers with solo exercisers [2] is the closest thing the study has to a control. It sets aside the idea that exercise by itself explains the difference. It leaves the confound sitting on the variable of interest, because choosing to do things together may itself be a sign of a happier couple.
Yorgason is plain about the size. "Our findings suggest that conjoint exercise facilitates, in a small but significant way, the ability to resolve conflict peacefully," he said [3]. On direction he goes further: "While the impact is not necessarily large, it is very consistent, which gives me confidence that it is influencing relationships in some meaningful way" [4]. Consistency is better evidence that the association is stable than evidence of influence. Three self-reported measures from the same respondents will tend to move together if one general feeling about the marriage colours every answer.
"About 60% of husbands and wives in the sample said they exercised, but only about a third exercised together," Yorgason said [9]. Read as shares of the whole sample, that puts roughly 56% of exercisers working out with their spouse and about 44% doing it without them [18]. That fits his own summary that "about half the people who exercise are not exercising with their spouse" [10]. For that 44%, the habit already exists and only the company would change.
The researchers propose that the mechanism is conversation [19]. Couples who exercised together reported better listening and a stronger sense that their spouse heard and supported them [14]. "Out of all three outcomes, exercise had the biggest impact on communication," Mildenhall said [12], and she said walking "naturally provides opportunities to communicate" [13]. The study cannot separate the walking from the talking. Earlier research had already linked shared leisure time to benefits for couples, and this study narrowed the focus to physical activity [15]. Separating the two would take a comparison with a shared activity that involves no exercise.
I think the study earns a modest recommendation, with conditions attached. The sample is young, newly married American couples [6][7], and the association is small [3]. Exercise is well known to support physical fitness and mental well-being on its own [17], so the downside of a regular walk together is low. The researchers say shared exercise is not a solution for every relationship difficulty, and that couples raising children may need deliberate planning to fit it in [16].
What to watch
- Whether the Family Relations paper reports effect sizes and uses CREATE's repeated waves to test whether starting shared exercise comes before changes in communication.
- A trial that randomises couples to shared walks or to a shared activity with no exercise, which would separate the exercise from the conversation.
- Whether the association holds in older or longer-married couples outside this young, newly married US sample.