From a self-determination theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan 1985; Ryan & Deci, 2002) perspective, the nature of motivation is dynamic and the quite recent concept of “motivational soup” suggest that different types of motivational regulations coexist within people and that these within-person patterns in turn will produce different patterns of behavior. Instead of using traditional approaches focusing on variable centered analyses and between-person patterns, the relatively new trend (within this area) of using person-centered statistical analyses permit insights and understanding in how motivational regulations interact within persons and how these interactions relate to behavior. Such knowledge would provide a valuable contribution to the tailoring of interventions aimed to target specific groups of people using potent psychographic profiles as moderators instead of more blunted demographic variables (Hardcastle & Hagger, 2015). This symposium brings together European researchers from four different universities to discuss new insights on within-person relationships in different steps of the SDT process model. The first presenter will look into the associations between behavioral regulation profiles and exercisers’ emotional response in a large sample of health clubs members. The second presenter will discuss exercise motivational profiles of obese patients and how these relate to exercise behavior 6-months post-discharge. The third presenter will describe a model with four motivation profiles for exercise professionals in relationship to multiple continuous outcomes such as work satisfaction, emotional exhaustion and depersonalization. The fourth presenter will share results from a latent transition analysis on a three-wave longitudinal study in a digital context. The following discussion will then be focused on overlapping and specific motivational profiles in relation to exercise and physical activity promotion and strategies for future research and applications.