With this book, you will learn what factors have long-term influence on people's exercise habits. Using a full-scale technology of exercise adherence methods and strategies produced from years of carefully conducted research, the book's author shows you how these products of scientific inquiry can be taken out of the research world, put into practical form, and used by you, the practitioner. Until now, such techniques have been left largely in the st! orage vault of academia. This book will serve as your step-by-step guide for taking the relevant contributions from exercise psychology, behavioral psychology, performance enhancement and stress management, and putting them to work for your immediate benefit. Exercise is treated as a desirable behavior over which you, along with your clients, may gain control. Strategies such as relapse prevention, goal-setting, dissociation from discomfort and motivational assessment will become yours to enhance exercise persistence and raise retention rates. You and are staff are given the necessary tools to affect change in a systematic, flexible, dependable manner.