DOI: 10.14457/tu.the.2019.442
title: Attitudes and perceptions of Thai women toward weight training

description: Recently, health has become one of the most popular trends globally. In addition to good nutrition and developing healthy behaviors and avoiding risky behavior, exercise is another factor people consider to improve overall health. Weight training is one type of exercise that is generally known and has been done by males for a long time, but fewer females participate in this physical activity. This research studied the attitudes and perceptions of Thai women toward weight training and is a contemporary topic in applied marketing in the health industry. The purpose of this study is to help fitness business providers and personal trainers increase target customers by shifting their exercise behavior from other physical activities to strength training without quitting other types of exercise but mixing them together. This study could help fitness managers understand more about Thai women’s attitudes, and perceptions as well as using insights and needs to increase customer satisfaction levels and develop a business plan and marketing plan for their personal and organizational benefit.According to the literature review, women did not participate in weight training in the past. There are a variety of factors that limit the sport’sgrowth and disassociate women from weight training such as demographics, psychographics, social factors, gender roles, customers’ past experience, specific knowledge, etc. Even thoughthe number of women nowadays that engage in weight training has slightly increased, it is still low in number when compared to men. This research studied the characteristics of customer segments and the factors that affect women’s exercise behaviors for each segment. The data was analyzed to find key factors that influence and could increase the number of Thai women who do strength or weight training as well as key barriers that dissociate women from practicing weight training.The research consisted of qualitative and quantitative research. It was done using two different research designs which were Exploratory Research and Descriptive Research. Exploratory research aimed to gain an understanding of the fitness industry both in Thailand and internationally. It was conducted using secondary data and in-depth interviews. Secondary data was gathered by using related articles, journals, books, interviews, literature reviews and credible sources. The in-depth interviews were done with 10 females aged between 25 and 63 years old who live in the Bangkok metropolitan area and had exercised within the past 6 months. There were 7 weight training respondents and 3 non-weight training respondents. The results of this in-depth interviews were used to develop the questionnaires for the descriptive research. The descriptive research was conducted by using a questionnaire to obtain data from 200 female respondents who have the same criteria as the in-depth interview respondents. The collected data was interpreted and analyzed to know customers and non-customers' characteristics, as well as key factors and key barriers that affect their exercise selection. The questionnaire was developed using Google Form, and distributed online through personal contacts.The analysis of qualitative research focused on insights from the in-depth interviews of women who practice weight training and who do not weight practice training in order to develop a questionnaire for the quantitative research. The collected data from the survey was analyzedusing the Statistics Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). From the data analysis, the 200 respondents were grouped into two segments using weight training as criteria to separate them. The segments are weight training customers and non-weight training customers and accounted for 123 respondents (61.5%) and 77 respondents (38.5%), respectively. The characteristics of these 2 segments are similar in demographics but a few differences in lifestyle, interests, and exercise knowledge emerged. The discovered key factors that influences females to practice weight training are exercise knowledge and influencers. While key barriers that dissociated women from weight training is lack of proper knowledge. The results also showed that women nowadays have positive perception toward weight training exercise.From the data analysis, there are 2 main key recommendations that fitness managers may use to increase the number of weight training customers. First, the manager should educate them for how to weight train properly and use the fitness equipment correctly by using easy to understand instructions. Another recommendation is using influencers such as current customers who weight train and those who have weight training expertise such as a personal trainer.