Sweat Science

When you kick a soccer ball, it tends to go where you’re looking. The problem is that when you’re anxious, you tend to fixate on threats — the goalkeeper, in this case — and consequently kick it straight at him. That’s the message from an interesting University of Exeter study published last month, which I just noticed thanks to Dan Peterson’s blog.

The players wore special glasses which enabled the researchers to record precise eye movements and analyse the focus of each footballer’s gaze and the amount of time spent looking at different locations in the goal. The results showed that when anxious, the footballers looked at the goalkeeper significantly earlier and for longer. This change in eye behaviour made players more likely to shoot towards the centre of the goal, making it easier for the keeper to save.

The solution? “Research shows that the optimum strategy for penalty takers to use is to pick a spot and shoot to it, ignoring the goalkeeper in the process,” the study’s author says. And to do that, you need to practice, so that the skill becomes so ingrained it no longer requires conscious control, as discussed in this Jockology column.

mental, sports psych

This week’s Jockology column takes a closer look at the idea that group exercise offers some benefits that solo sessions don’t.

The question

Will taking a class or finding training partners help me keep my exercise resolutions this year?

The answer

Consider the similarities between a modern exercise class and an ancient religious rite – the wise leader guiding the group through a series of ritualized movements, in perfect synchronization. If you’re struggling to keep faith with your fitness goals, this apparent coincidence might offer a solution.

New research suggests that group exercise unleashes a flood of chemicals in the brain, triggering the same responses that have made collective activities from dancing and laughter to religion itself such enduring aspects of human culture. For some (but not all) people, finding workout buddies could help turn fitness into a pleasant addiction. [read on...]

Obviously people have a lot of different reasons for working out in groups — or for working out on their own, for that matter. But I found the study of Oxford rowers described in the article to be one of the most interesting studies of 2009. In the running community, there’s a lot of debate about why so many athletes stop competing seriously after they finish university. Again, there are clearly many different reasons — but I’ve heard a lot of runners say that the training experience just isn’t the same once they’re no longer part of a group working out together and sharing common goals. Maybe this is really just a form of endorphin withdrawal!

sports psych

This week’s Jockology column is about performing under pressure — though it has surprising applications even to simple tasks like running:

The question

When the game is on the line, should I take my time with the ball or just get it over with?

The answer

When you’re lining up a crucial putt, the last thing you want to hear is an impatient jerk behind you yelling, “Hey buddy, could you hurry it up a bit?”

But new research suggests that jerk may be doing you a favour.

Psychologists and neuroscientists are finding that when we perform complex motor sequences that we’re very familiar with, concentrating too much on the details makes our performance worse. It’s what causes choking on the putting green or at the free-throw line – and it’s why a bit of a distraction can be a good thing. [read on...]

sports psych

Over the past few months, I’ve posted a few links to interesting studies about the potential positive and negative effects of distractions on your workout. I decided to take a deeper look at the literature in this field, and put together a Jockology column that appears in today’s Globe and Mail on the topic.

The question

I love listening to music or watching TV when I exercise. How does that affect my workout?

The answer

In a forthcoming study, British researchers secretly sped up or slowed down music by 10 per cent and observed the effect on subjects riding exercise bikes. Sure enough, like marionettes on musical strings, the riders unconsciously sped up or slowed down.

The results add to a complex body of research on how distractions influence our exercise performance, extending far beyond the simple psych-up provided by motivational lyrics. Instead of just hitting shuffle next time you’re at the gym, you might be able to harness these benefits by taking control of your playlist to enhance your workout. [read on...]

Ultimately, it’s a pretty complicated stew of different (and sometimes conflicting) effects. You might be listening to a tune whose motivational lyrics urge you forward, but also distract you from the physical cues you might otherwise rely on to maintain your intensity. And you might find your breathing or stride rate locking in sync with the music — which could be good or bad, depending on the tempo. And all of those factors might be overridden by the simple question of how much you like the tune that’s playing. So for now, I think optimizing a playlist remains a matter of personal preference.

(And I almost hesitate to say this, because I realize I’m in a shrinking minority, but my own inclination is to exercise in silence. If I’m outside, I like hearing my surroundings, particularly if I’m in a nice forest or park. And in general, I like to let my thoughts wander aimlessly and free-associate. The problem with music, I find, is that I tend to really listen to it, so it guides and anesthetizes my thoughts. For the same reason, I can’t write with music on in the background — it grabs my attention too forcefully.)

mental, sports psych

A few months ago, I wrote about some research showing that people in “spinning” classes tended to exercise wayyy harder than if they’d just hopped on an exercise bike by themselves. In fact, many spinners were reaching intensities higher than the “maximum” predicted by researchers! With that in mind, I was interested to see a recent study in Biology Letters from researchers at Oxford University about the chemical effects of group workouts. As a BBC report put it:

Exercising together appears to increase the level of the feel-good endorphin hormones naturally released during physical exertion, a study suggests. A team from Oxford University carried out tests on 12 rowers after a vigorous workout in a virtual boat. Those who trained alone withstood less pain – a key measure of endorphins – than those who exercised together.

It’s worth noting that they didn’t simply measure rowing performance, where the motivational effects of being in a group might have helped the subjects push harder. They actually subjected them to a torture test: after the rowing, they inflated a blood-pressure sleeve around the subjects’ arms to cut off circulation, and timed how long they could withstand the pain. (Resistance to pain is a proxy for endorphin production.) Sure enough, the solo exercisers couldn’t last as long as the group exercisers, indicating that there was something going on inside the body during the group workout.

The researchers speculate that this mechanism may be the key to other social activities (“such as laughter, music-making and dancing”). More importantly, from our point of view, it’s good to have a reason to seek out training partners!

mental, sports psych

There’s a very interesting article in the current issue of the Journal of Sports Sciences about how your mental focus affects running economy (which is basically the amount of oxygen you use to run at given speed, something that we can’t control consciously). In brief, German researchers had a group of subjects run while focusing either on internal cues (their running form or their breathing) or external cues (a video clip of running through the streets). The running economy was significantly better when the subjects were focusing externally rather than internally, with breathing taking bottom spot.

This result fits in with a large body of research on motor control. The theory is that we have to pay careful attention when we’re learning complex tasks, but they eventually become part of the “procedural knowledge” that we execute automatically. Trying to pay specific attention to one part of a complex action disrupts this automated movement.

For example, Beilock et al. (2002) studied this effect on the motor skills of golf putting and dribbling with a soccer ball. In both sports, they found that for experienced players an internal focus of attention led to a deterioration of performance on behavioural measures (higher number of strokes per hole in golf and slower completion of a dribbling course in soccer).

There are other studies in sports ranging from hockey to dart-throwing. (In the latter case, in addition to differences in accuracy, “heart rate dropped just before the throw in the external condition, whereas it rose in the internal one.”) The basic gist is that thinking too hard about what you’re about to do messes things up.

In endurance running, though, it’s not obvious this would apply. In fact, there’s a fairly long literature arguing that “association” (paying attention to your body’s cues) leads to faster running than “dissociation” (thinking about the weather and last night’s episode of House). The authors of this paper cite a bunch of conflicting papers, making it clear that the topic is an open question right now. One of the tricky things about running studies is that measuring success by how far or fast the subjects run gets skewed by their motivation levels. That’s why they chose to use running economy as the outcome — it’s outside the conscious control of the runners.

For the record, the study used 24 trained runners with a mean 10K best of 36:27 and had them run at 75% of VO2max, a typical brisk training run. The external focus proved to be best in this case, but that may not apply, the authors point out, in racing a marathon or other contexts.

One final note: one of the pieces of advice beginning runners are often given is “pay attention to your breathing.” In this study, those who paid attention to their breathing for some reason slowed down their average breathing rate by almost 20 percent, taking deeper breaths and hurting their running economy.

The results for the breathing condition lead to the assumption that breathing, which is a highly automated process, will adjust most efficiently to the needs of the body when it is not subjected to conscious control.

In other words, you take care of the running, and your subconscious will make sure your muscles get enough oxygen.

mental, sports psych

Good article in the Toronto Star by Paola Loriggio about the trend towards high-tech gyms. For example: the Gold’s Gym in London, Ont. that just opened one of the country’s first “cardio gyms,” where users can watch cinema-sized screens in a dark room while sweating on their cardio machines. She lists some pros and cons; most interesting to me is the following:

There’s a reason workouts seem easier when you’re watching TV – it’s because they are.

Researchers at Elon University in North Carolina studied the effects of various distractions on exercisers, and found those watching television didn’t work as hard as those listening to music, or toiling in silence.

“They were working at a very, very low intensity,” says Paul Miller, one of the researchers involved in the study, performed in 2005-2006 and slated for publication later this year.

“I think they got so engrossed, they didn’t pay attention to physical cues.”

Music, in contrast, apparently helps people push harder. I’ve often wondered about this. I suppose if you were running on a treadmill, and knew in advance what pace you wanted to run, you could just set the treadmill at that pace and it wouldn’t let you slack. Still, it’s food for thought.

sports psych, sports technology

This is a neat paper on how running affects the mind, with a surprise twist. (Check out Frontal Cortex and Neurocritic for more detailed discussions.) Researchers at Columbia University wondered whether the extreme stress of running a marathon might trigger hormones in the brain that would temporarily alter how our minds work. It’s a reasonable assumption:

Indeed, [the researchers write] cortisol levels recorded 30 min after completion of a marathon rival those reported in military training and interrogation (Taylor et al., 2007), rape victims being treated acutely (Resnick, Yehuda, Pitman, & Foy, 1995), severe burn injury patients (Norbury, Herndon, Branski, Chinkes, & Jeschke, 2008), and first-time parachute jumpers (Aloe et al., 1994).

So does running disrupt your memory? Yes. The researchers tested Boston and New York marathon participants, either a few days before their race or within 30 minutes of finishing, and the post-race tests showed worse performance on a set of verbal memory tests. That’s an example of “explicit memory,” where you consciously remember events and facts. But here’s the surprise: the researchers also found that the post-race testees did better on tests of “implicit memory,” which is how you store information that you don’t need to access consciously, like how to ride a bike.

In other words, it appears that being under stress (and marathons definitely count as stress!) causes you to tap into the older, reptilian part of your brain, where instinct and intuition dominate.

[Thanks to Kyle for the tip. I'm heading out the door in a few hours for a week-long canoe trip, so expect the next blog update around August 10. Happy long weekend!]

mental, running, sports psych

A friend forwarded me this Newsweek article about a British experiment on swearing and pain tolerance:

In a study published in this month’s issue of NeuroReport, [Richard Stephens of Keele University and his colleagues] asked participants to submerge their nondominant hand in ice-cold water for as long as possible (or for a maximum of 10 minutes) while either repeating a swear word or a neutral word (one that describes a table). The volume and pace used for swear words and neutral words were kept similar. Then, the researchers compared those who swore and those who didn’t to determine the effect on the length of time that participants were able to keep their hands submerged.

Subjects who swore managed an average of 40 seconds, or about a third longer than those who didn’t—evidence that a few well-placed word bombs of your choosing actually has a protective effect. [read on...]

So next time you’re trying to hit one last rep in the weight room, or hang on for one more kilometre at your maximum pace, take a look around — and if there are no children in sight, try swearing a blue streak to success!

[Thanks for the forward, Jay.]

mental, sports psych

Caffeine, as we’ve noted before, is probably the most versatile and powerful legal performance enhancer out there. Researchers can’t seem to find enough good things to say about it. And one of its most head-scratching properties is that it appears to give as much of a boost to habitual users as it does to caffeine virgins. But a new study in the journal Psychopharmacology offers a rare discordant voice. Read more…

sports psych, supplements