When Passion Appears, Exercise Addiction Disappears

Abstract. There are approximately 1,000 published articles on exercise addiction, which is characterized by exaggerated training yielding adverse effects. In contrast, there are less than 20 identified cases of exercise addiction in the literature. Recently, it was reported that there is an association between exercise addiction and passion. To test the impact of the latter on exercise addiction, we reanalyzed the combined data from two recent studies. High- and low-exercise volume groups differed in exercise addiction even after controlling for age and sex ( p < .001). However, after adding obsessive and harmonious passion as continuous predictor variables, the statistical significance vanished, whereas both predictors emerged as significant ( p < .001). Further, when controlled for the effect of passion, the correlation between exercise addiction and weekly exercise volume turned out to be negative. Therefore, a conceptual confound between the presumed risk of exercise addiction and passion could render the results of several hundreds of published works questionable. The current findings send an important message to scholars in the field: Studying exercise addiction without controlling for passion may yield false results.