Whether or not people are workout fiends or grumble their way to the gym may have a genetic component, according to HealthDay.
At an American Physiological Society meeting, the University of Georgia's Rodney Dishman discussed how he and his colleagues analyzed the exercise habits of 3,000 adults as well as how their brains reacted to exercise, reports Cosmopolitan's Elizabeth Narins. From this, the researchers noticed that people who avoided exercise harbored genetic variations within dopamine binding genes. That means, Australia's Women's Day adds, that some people get a post-workout dopamine boost, while others don't.
"Combined with personality measures, we think these genes may help explain why some people have a natural urge to be active, while others never do," Dishman tells Cosmo.
HealthDay notes that people who don't have that urge to exercise can still train themselves to like it. "Genetics is very, very important, but nothing is written in stone," Dori Arad from Mount Sinai St. Luke's Hospital tells HealthDay. "You can decide to be active and move and do exercise, and in essence you can rewrite your brain so that exercise becomes pleasurable and rewarding."