Exploring the Benefits of Incorporating Exercise Into Traditional Therapeutic Practice
Exploring the Benefits of Incorporating Exercise Into Traditional Therapeutic Practice
No Thumbnail Available
Issue Date
2025-09-04
Authors
Meldrum, Levi
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
This capstone explores the benefits of incorporating exercise into traditional counselling sessions. With increasing prevalence of sedentary behaviour and physical inactivity globally and continued stigma associated with mental health treatments, there is an urgent need to address these pressing health concerns. This capstone explores the benefits for clients to participate in counselling that incorporates exercise into psychotherapy compared to traditional psychotherapy. The literature review was guided by holistic health theory and common factors research. The literature review reveals mixed results about the benefits of exercise psychotherapy for clients' mental and physical health. Several studies highlight the benefits of exercise psychotherapy with six of them providing clients with superior outcomes compared to traditional counselling. Three studies demonstrated that exercise psychotherapy achieved the same outcomes as traditional counselling. The literature review also highlights the importance of accommodating client preferences to develop a strong therapeutic alliance. Despite these findings, many limitations to the quality and generalizability of this research were identified, including the small sample size of some of the studies, double meanings of search terms used for this study, and the need for more research focused on identifying individuals or presenting problems that would particularly benefit from exercise psychotherapy. This capstone contributes to the field of counselling psychology by providing evidence to suggest that exercise psychotherapy is beneficial to those who participate in it and that it can be part of a holistic approach to treating physical and mental health issues.
Description
Keywords
exercise psychotherapy , walk and talk , holistic health , common factors research , exercise and counselling , posttraumatic stress disorder , PTSD
License
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States , openAccess