The role of personal identity for sports and exercise across the life span: Mediating processes and determinants.

In this article, I discuss the role of personal identity for engagement in physical exercise. While being a most powerful determinant of an individual's level of physical exercise, the identity of a person is still a distal predictor that does not immediately translate into specific behaviours. Important questions thus relate to the processes that mediate effects of personal identity on behaviour and developmental outcomes. Cybernetic models focusing on negative feedback loops (discrepancy detection and corrective processes) provide only a limited understanding of these processes, and have to be complemented with other motivational accounts that specify a more proactive role for identity in the selection of goals and in seeking and engaging in opportunities to become physically active. Furthermore, to increase the potential of identity-related theories for the development of interventions, it is necessary to reflect on the determinants of identity in the domain of physical activity. Processes of accommodation and internalization figure prominently in explaining differences in activity-related identities, especially in later phases of life where many individuals internalize negative age stereotypes of being incapable of physical activity.