What color is your workout? Book can help find your match
You have tried to build a personal workout plan, but it hasn't been satisfying, or successful.
Your best friend suggests a workout regimen but it just isn't right for you.
There is a way to determine the best kind of workout plan for you, and it depends upon your personality type.
A book titled "The 8 Colors of Fitness: Discover Your Color-Coded Fitness Personality" by Suzanne Brue can assist you in determining how best to go about becoming more fit. It is a system that determines your personality type and then describes a fitness system that works best with your personality.
The book was given to each of the five contestants in the Daily Herald's Fittest Loser contest as a way to help them determine the workout plan that was best suited for their personality.
As described by Brue on her website, www.the8colors.com, the system came about after years of working with the Myers-Briggs personality assessment.
"The eight colors is based on eight preference pairs, each corresponding to a color," Brue said. "By understanding your fitness personality you gain an understanding of your motivational patterns, preferred interactions, and environments, and can more effectively choose specific forms of physical activity that are best for you and you will stick with."
The examples given on the website include people who like traditional training versus those that like something new and innovative; or people who prefer quiet versus those who prefer music, or the sound of others working out.
"In reality, doing any activity that doesn't suit who you are at your core will feel like a chore, and you won't stick to a consistent routine," Brue said.
Brue, president of the Association for Psychological Type International, worked with the Myers-Briggs test for years, and came up with her own system for categorizing people in terms of color.
There are eight color categories: blue, gold, red, green, silver, saffron, white and purple. Each color aligns with a personality type; for instance, "whites" are visionaries, while "golds" are traditionalists.
How do these personality types relate to fitness programs?
"'Blues' are guided by clear fitness goals and objectives," the book says. "Blues prefer keeping their exercise plans plain and simple."
Deb Mirabelli, a contestant in the Fittest Loser competition, found the book enlightening.
"It was really interesting," Mirabelli said. "I am a silver. A lot of my motivation for working out has to be real, has to be important, or I won't do it. I am not a person that can give up that time without motivation."
The book confirmed what Fittest Loser competitor Jan Vitullo knew about herself.
"Red is my favorite color, so it was fitting that I was registered as a red," Vitullo said. "Red has a strong personality, determined and completive, and that was me and is me."