Create a custom fitness plan you won’t quit
The 8 Colors of Fitness program was developed to help you understand the ways your mind and body respond to exercising. Other exercise programs may start with a fitness plan and don’t consider your unique requirements. With this program, you start by understanding your fitness personality. After you’ve learned more about your fitness personality, you can choose the specific workouts, interactions, and environments that are suited to your needs.
Discover Design Learn
After you take the quiz, click your color below for information about your fitness personality. By identifying your own fitness color and learning more about it, you’ll understand why you’re drawn to certain activities and environments, and why you avoid others. This knowledge will help you make better fitness choices for your personality and take the physical activity from boredom to enjoyment.
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The history
“What keeps people in an exercise program year after year?” is the question author Suzanne Brue set out to answer.
She saw that the current approach used by fitness instructors and medical professionals has some benefits, but misses a simple truth: physical activity is an expression of personality. Brue, a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) expert, conducted a study in which she interviewed hundreds of active people representing the MBTI types. After evaluating the research, she created a color-coded way to highlight the most effective preferences of each personality. This became The 8 Colors of Fitness. Read more about Suzanne and the connection between MBTI and The 8 Colors fitness personalities.
MBTI and the 8 colors
The MBTI is a questionnaire that was designed to find a person’s personality type, preferences, and strengths they possess. It was developed by mother-daughter duo Katherine Briggs and Isabel Myers and was based on Carl Jung’s theory of personality types. Today, the MBTI is one of the most popular psychological tools in the world.
The MBTI system interprets your personality according to four categories. These categories cover how extroverted or introverted you are, how you perceive and process information, how logical or emotional your decisions are, and how open-ended you prefer things to be. The result is 16 basic personality types. Suzanne’s research shows that our exercise preferences tend to reflect our perceiving processes of sensing and intuition—whether we tend to accept information or re-interpret and augment it. Personality types sharing the same perceiving process could be paired together creating eight fitness personalities.
Below, you will find the connection between MBTI and The 8 Colors fitness personalities:
- Blues: ISTJ, ISFJ
- Golds: ESTJ ESFJ
- Whites: INTJ, INFJ
- Purples: ENTJ, ENFJ
- Greens: ISTP, ISFP
- Reds: ESTP, ESFP
- Saffrons: INTP, INFP
- Silvers: ENTP, ENFP
Background
Suzanne began her career in Burlington, Vermont, where she held faculty and counseling positions at Trinity College and the University of Vermont. For decades, she helped guide students through the essential, challenging process of self-discovery. In her mid-30s, after a self-discovery of her own, Suzanne decided to commit to an active lifestyle. She naturally embraced fitness, and this made her curious about why others struggled to maintain momentum. She decided to look at fitness through the lens of personality type and quickly noticed that we’re far more likely to succeed with exercise when the activity and environment match our own innate tendencies.
Creating The 8 Colors
Suzanne embarked on a research project that resulted in a revolutionary fitness personality system inspired by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®. Based on six years of research with physically active people of all types, she wrote The 8 Colors of Fitness: Discover Your Color-Coded Fitness Personality and Create an Exercise Program You’ll Never Quit (Oakledge, 2008). This groundbreaking book offers practical, down-to-earth advice for every fitness personality from those new to fitness to no-nonsense gym rats and competitive athletes. In 2015, she followed this with The 8 Colors of Fitness: Your Workbook (Oakledge 2015)—an interactive workbook.
Where She’s at Today
Suzanne is a frequent speaker at psychological and fitness conferences, and her work has been featured in Arthritis Today, Experience Life, Natural Health Magazine, and many more publications. She has also developed a statewide physical activity program for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida. Suzanne served as president of the Association for Psychological Type International, president of the Vermont Association of Psychological Type, and was a member of the Vermont Governor’s Council for Physical Fitness and Sports.
Suzanne, a Purple Harmony, enjoys a variety of activities including swimming, biking, yoga, and strength training. She and her Silver Efficient husband currently live in Delray Beach, Florida.