Asking a flagging club member in advance about the amount of exercise they plan to take will increase the total amount of time spent at the club.

That is the conclusion of a study, titled When Does the Past Repeat Itself? The Interplay of Behavior Prediction and Personal Norms, conducted by a team at the University of Arkansas, to be published in the Journal of Consumer Research later this year.

In the report, researches Pierre Chandon and Ronn Smith say that asking people to predict whether they will exercise in the next week will make them think about what they should do.

"Asking people about their exercise plans reduces the chances that they will simply repeat their past behaviour and hence breaks their habits," Smith added.

In one experiment, asking about future exercising led to an estimated 94 additional minutes of exercising (an increase of 138 per cent) for students who had only exercised for 10 minutes in the week before.

"These findings have important implications, not only for those of us who are attempting to keep our New Year's resolutions, but also for managers or policy makers attempting to reinforce valuable habits and to disrupt harmful ones," the authors conclude.