Hello everyone! I am a member of Nighthawks, where we are analyzing workout habits with the hope of helping people improve their workout routines. I chose to analyze two personas from the study: LW, who is a military veteran and avid exerciser who is currently training for her second marathon, and TB, a formerly competitive high school and college cross country, swimming, and rowing athlete. Summarized within the Persona blocks are brief snapshots of who each of our participants are and what drives them. They both have unique motivations, challenges, and philosophies, which makes our whole project all the more exciting. Everyone works out for different reasons, and everyone also struggles to exercise for different reasons.
To begin with, let’s take a look at LW:
LW became a competitor at a young age and has not lost that. She has extreme motivation to constantly become physically stronger and be healthier in every stage of her life. For her, longevity is key and any amount of working out is a success.
PDF version to make viewing easier – Journey LW
She exercises each day of the study as a part of her training for her second marathon. We saw some conflicts with her ideal schedule and reality, namely in that she does not lift as much as she would like. She runs into barriers of exhaustion, often attributed to lack of recovery from late nights studying and other factors like relationships.
Next, let’s take a look at TB:
TB has a long history of competitive aerobic and endurance sports, and is searching for a way to chase the dragon of aerobic satisfaction that he’s become accustomed to over the past 10 years of high-performance athletics. He is in the intense Law program at Stanford and struggles to balance his school commitments with his athletic desires.
PDF version to make viewing easier – Journey TB
TB had a rough week when we conducted our study. He is dealing with nagging lower leg problems like shin splints and Achilles pain. Moreover, the requirements of 1L life at Stanford Law hit him in full force. He would workout at night due to sleeping in, which, in turn, means staying up late each night to get schoolwork done post exercise. TB finds himself in a cycle of days of exhaustion where sometimes a workout just does not quite fit into the schedule.
In summary, LW and TB battle with different, very worthwhile commitments that get in the way of their workout routines. Each of them also prefers different modalities of working out and values different parts of exercise. LW has a mix of concrete and abstract goals while TB is generally hoping to return what he feels is his best. School undoubtedly makes for a difficult environment to get done everything we want to get done, so diving further into the possibilities of breaking barriers to more satisfying and enriching exercise should be our primary focus. Both respondents enjoyed reflecting on their workouts, feeling that they had never devoted much time to that activity in the past. Interestingly, TB gave a relatively high motivation rating despite only being able to workout once in a week. It appears that framing of exercise towards a greater goal rather than focusing on one exercise at a time is quite successful. Perhaps we can leverage the desire for reflection to help people find more value in a workout of any magnitude, even when school and other commitments are at their busiest.
