Whats the difference between Retention and exercise adherence ?
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What's the difference between retention and exercise adherence?
Someone had asked me and thought they were the same thing.
So here I clearly lay out the difference between the two.
We have retention and we have attrition.
Another common term that's used is exercise adherence and what's the difference between retention, attrition and exercise adherence?
Adherence is a measure of how many sessions someone completed compared to how many they said they were going to do.
If I start by saying,
I will do three sessions per week and I did three sessions per week. Then we would describe that as 100% adherence.
If I said I was going to do three sessions per week and I only did one per week. Then we describe that as 33% adherence
or if I said I was going to do six per month and I did my six, then it's a 100%.
If I said I was going to do six and only did four, then it's 66%.
So exercise adherence is about whether people stick to the frequency of exercise, that's either been prescribed to them or that they've said they would complete themselves.
You need to take care with giving people absolute figures in terms of exercise adherence, you're better off actually providing them with a range.
Some studies on exercise adherence required a three time a week adherence and they took a group of people who'd never exercised before and they gave them different types of exercise and some of them did three times per week and some of them managed twice per week.
Interestingly enough, in the summary, they considered those people who'd gone from zero to two, failures because they weren't doing three times a week.
There was no recognition given to the fact that they'd gone from zero to two. They were considered failures because they hadn't gone from zero to three.
My suggestion would be that when you're presenting adherence figures to people, when you're doing an exercise prescription or when you're talking between staff, we should be giving them a range to achieve.
‘You want to try and achieve somewhere between four and 12 sessions per month, rather than an absolute of sessions set of three times per week.’
Now that would be considered adherence to the frequency of exercise but not to the content.
Exercise content adherence is called exercise compliance.
So whether someone's actually following the workout that's been designed for them or whether they've gone off and done their own thing after the first couple of weeks.
