WORDS LAURA POTTER
Three-quarters of women in the UK would like to make time to do more exercise, so why are we struggling to keep up the habit? ‘It comes down to your athletic identity,’ says Simon Marshall, sport psychologist and co-author of The Brave Athlete: Calm Th *ck Down And Rise To The Occasion (VeloPress, £21.95). ‘You form attitudes and beliefs about roles you play, so you have an identity as a partner, an employee, a friend.
The thoughts and beliefs that you have about yourself as an athlete, and how you think other people see you, begin in childhood. People who don’t think of themselves as “sporty” go through something called identity foreclosure.
My sister is a good example; growing up I was the “sporty one” and she was the “artistic one”. By the time she was 14, she hated sport. Her identity as an exerciser stopped growing prematurely. She only found it again in her 40s as a runner.’
The lesson here is that you can still challenge that athletic identity. ‘We think about our abilities and traits as fixed, so we’re either good at something or not,’ says Marshall. ‘That stops us trying, developing, persisting and ultimately enjoying sport, but you can pry that identity open and change it.’