Physical exercise has benefits that go beyond health and well-being, namely in cognitive, motor and psychophysiological areas. The discovery of a shared neural network between action observation and execution (Action-Observation Network) led us to hypothesize that watching human motor action might improve cognitive and motor aspects of performance and proneness for exercise.Sixty participants viewed a Motor (M) (n = 30) or a Non-Motor (NM) (n = 30) movie with strong or weak content of motoric features of human action, respectively. Performance in d2 Attention test, Fitts' Motor task, and a Proneness for Exercise Visual Analog Scale was assessed before and after movie visualization, in a cross-sectional study. Psychophysiological measures were recorded throughout the experiment.Our results demonstrate an increase in proneness for exercise, and greater improvement in attention-related cognitive aspects in the M group. The aforementioned benefits of action observation did not modulate motor performance. A mental effort deployment was associated to the decrease in heart rate variability after visualization of the NM movie. This was not conducive to attention channeling on task performance. Conversely, M movie observation seemed to be associated to a cognitive load release, affording attention deployment for the resolution of the subsequent tasks.It seems that some benefits associated to physical practice can result from the mere visualization of movies with human motor action content. These are the improvement in attention-related cognitive skills associated to psychophysiological changes that support a disengagement from mental effort. Crucially, the observation of exercise behavior seems to be a key factor for exercise adherence.