Exploring Ergodicity Of Associations Between Pre-exercise Readiness And Exercise-related Effort And Affective Experience

Readiness states can yield insight in predicting exercise effort and experience, but existing research is limited to single-session or qualitative designs with group-level (nomothetic) analysis. To best understand target phenomena and drive person-adaptive treatment, it is critical to determine if expected relationships among variables can generalize across within- and between-person patterns (ergodicity of association). PURPOSE: Explore ergodicity of associations between readiness dimensions and volitional exercise experiences reported in natural settings. METHODS: For 5-7 weeks, six participants initiated event-contingent ecological momentary assessments using pre- and post-exercise surveys bookmarked in their smartphones (18 ± 3 bouts/person, multiple exercise types). Reports captured pre-exercise physical, cognitive, and threat-challenge states (Acute Readiness Monitoring Scale), bout duration (min), perceived exertion (Category-10 Ratio Scale), and recalled in-task affective valence (Feeling Scale). Analyses included repeated measures correlation (within-person; 107 observations) and standard bivariate correlation (between-person; 6 observations using person-specific means). Associations were interpreted as weak (<0.30), moderate (0.30-0.49), or strong (>0.50), with preliminary p-values and confidence intervals included. RESULTS: Within-person associations showed expected patterns between readiness and affect (i.e., more pleasant exercise when reporting more favorable pre-exercise states), while only nomothetic analysis yielded expected patterns of readiness states with exertion and duration (see table). CONCLUSION: This work shows proof-of-concept that associations between readiness and experiential aspects of volitional, varied exercise appear to be non-ergodic. Results align with many non-exercise-related psychological processes, warranting replication with fully-powered samples.