Couples who exercise together report better communication, a study of nearly 1,700 marriages finds

Roughly one-third of the young married couples in a Brigham Young University data set exercise together, and those pairs describe their marriages in more favorable terms than couples who work out alone or skip exercise. Jeremy Yorgason, a professor in BYU’s School of Family Life, and his co-author Ashlyn Mildenhall analyzed responses from nearly 1,700 couples and reported the result in the journal Family Relations in 2026. The strongest association was with communication, and the most common thing couples did side by side was walk.

The CREATE sample and the split between solo and shared workouts

The couples come from CREATE, short for Couple Relationships and Transition Experiences, a BYU data set of newly married couples across the United States, and they split sharply on how they exercise: about 60 percent of the people in the sample worked out on their own, while only about one-third did so together as couples.

According to the university’s account of the study, the analysis covered nearly 1,700 young married couples, and a more detailed summary at Politis puts the exact count at 1,693, with wives averaging 27.9 years old and husbands 29.9. That leaves a large group that already works out but never shares the time with a spouse. Politis reports that about 46 percent of the couples had children, a detail that bears on how easily two adults can leave the house at the same hour. The gap between solo and shared exercise is where the study points to unused potential, since the habit already exists for most of these couples and only the company is missing.

Journal publication came earlier in the year than the recent wave of coverage suggests. SciTechDaily’s write-up lists Family Relations as the venue, dates publication to Aug. 5, 2026, and names a third author, Matthew L. Núñez, alongside Mildenhall and Yorgason.

Communication first, with walking as the shared habit

Couples who exercised together reported better communication, more effective conflict resolution and less marital stress than couples who exercised separately or not at all. Physical activity done jointly showed stronger links to positive relationship outcomes than the same activity done apart, a comparison that holds the exercise itself constant and varies only whether a spouse was there.

Mildenhall singled out communication in the university’s account: exercise, she said, had the biggest impact there. The outcomes the study examined included how well partners listen, whether they understand each other’s perspectives, how they handle disagreements, and how often and how severely they argue. Of those, communication stood out, and the conflict-resolution gains were smaller. The largest association is therefore with talking rather than with the physical effects of a workout, which is what makes the finding notable for a study of marriages rather than of fitness.

Yorgason framed the conflict result in modest terms. In his words, conjoint exercise facilitates, in a small but significant way, the ability to resolve conflict peacefully. A small but statistically significant association in a sample this large can be real without being large in everyday terms, and he did not claim otherwise. Walking was the most common shared activity. The team’s reasoning, as relayed by The Week, is that a walk naturally provides time to talk, to listen and to enjoy each other’s company, with no screen or agenda in between. That is a mechanism offered to explain the pattern, not something the survey measured directly.

A correlation, and what the data cannot sort out

The finding is correlational. Couples who already communicate well may simply be the ones who find it easy to schedule a walk together, so the direction of the relationship cannot be read from the survey responses alone. The Politis summary adds that exercise was self-reported, that intensity and frequency were not tracked, and that the sample skewed toward moderate- and high-income, college-educated couples.

The effect sizes are small by the authors’ own description, which matters for anyone tempted to treat a shared workout as a repair tool for a struggling marriage. Yorgason and Mildenhall have been explicit that exercise is not a solution for every relationship difficulty, only one healthy habit among several that support connection.

Time is the obstacle the coverage raises most often. The Week notes that many couples struggle to line up schedules around work and children. A walk after dinner or on a weekend morning asks for less coordination than a gym class or a training plan, and that is consistent with walking topping the list of shared activities.

The practical benchmark sits elsewhere. The CDC’s adult activity guideline is 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity a week plus muscle-strengthening work on two or more days. The BYU analysis does not say how many of those minutes a couple needs to spend together to see a difference in communication, and with only one-third of the sample sharing workouts at all, that threshold remains unmeasured.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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