From Intention to Sustained Action: Integrating Efficacy, Feasibility, Continuity, and Adaptability in Adult Exercise

Knowing that exercise is beneficial does not guarantee that exercise will occur or persist. This paper examines the translation of exercise intentions into sustained action and proposes a research-informed conceptual framework for evaluating exercise programmes in real-life conditions. The paper is a claim-guided narrative synthesis rather than a systematic review. Evidence is integrated across the intention-behaviour gap, autonomous motivation, implementation intentions, habit formation, social support, self-monitoring, barriers and facilitators, exercise interruptions, all-or-nothing thinking, autoregulation, and reduced training doses. The central proposal is that practical programme quality should be considered across four interacting dimensions: efficacy, feasibility, continuity, and adaptability. These dimensions are not substitutes for one another; the aim is to preserve sufficient goal-related efficacy while making repeated implementation realistic and resilient to changing circumstances. The paper also distinguishes development and maintenance dose from a proposed continuity-preserving session used during constrained periods. Practice heuristics are presented separately from empirically supported claims and are explicitly non-validated. The broader principle is that sustainable exercise is not perfect adherence to a perfect plan, but sufficiently appropriate training performed sufficiently often, for sufficiently long, with the capacity to adapt and return.