Fitness Friends Make Workouts Friendly

Welcome to Walking the Walk, a feature that takes a deeper look at commonly shared diet and fitness advice. Every other week, I'll choose one piece of advice and practice it for seven days. Then I'll report back on what I discovered about making it work in real life and how it affected my own personal fitness -- and how it ultimately can affect your own efforts.

Starting an exercise routine is easy, it's maintaining one that causes many people trouble. One of the most common pieces of fitness advice is to find a friend -- a fitness friend, that is -- so that you're accountable to someone other than yourself to show up for that workout.

It's reasonable advice. If you've made a date with yourself for a 6 a.m. morning run, it's pretty easy to roll over and hit the snooze. But if you know your fitness buddy is standing outside, stretching and warming up, it's a lot harder to say no.

But fitness buddies offer more than accountability, they also might extend the length of your workouts. According to a recent study from the University of California at San Diego, people who were well matched with a fitness partner worked out longer. The trick is finding the right workout partner, because that same study found that exercising with someone fitter actually caused people to cut their workouts short.

Accountability, emotional support and enhanced workout? Sign me up! My plan this week is to convince a friend to commit to seven days in a row of shared workouts.