Tag: mental

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To clinch victory, shoot for the left side of the net

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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Interesting press release about an upcoming study in Psychological Science. In an analysis of every World Cup penalty shoot-out from 1982 to 2010, researchers from the University of Amsterdam found that goalies tend to dive to the right when their team is down and the game is on the line. (In other situations, they were equally likely to go right or left.)

Many studies have found that people and animals that want something tend to go to the right. When dogs see their owners, they wag their tails more to the right; toads strike to the right when they’re going for prey; and humans are more likely to turn their heads to the right to smooch their sweeties…

In an experiment, the team found that people who are told to divide a line in half tend to aim a bit to the right when they are both thinking about a positive goal and under time pressure—just like the goalies.

So how will this affect strategy in the next World Cup? Now the goalies know about this innate tendency; but the shooters know that the goalies know; but the goalies know that the shooters know that the goalies know…

[Minor gripe: the press release doesn’t actually reveal what the split in the data was — i.e. 51:49? 70:30? And the paper itself isn’t yet available online. A rather crucial detail, I’d have thought.]

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Athletes have superior street-crossing abilities

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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How’s this for a compelling reason to take up sports, from the conclusions of a newly published University of Illinois study:

Compared to non-athletes, collegiate Division I athletes showed higher street crossing success rates, as reflected by fewer collisions with moving vehicles.

It’s actually an interesting study, though it’s hard not to snicker while reading it. Researchers assembled 18 D1 athletes from a variety of sports (baseball, XC, gymnastics, soccer, swimming, tennis, track, wrestling) and 18 non-athlete controls matched for age, gender, height, weight, GPA and video-game experience, then had them all try to successfully cross a busy street in a 3-D virtual environment, while walking on a manual self-paced treadmill. The results: athletes made it to the other side without getting splatted 72.05% of the time, while non-athletes only made it 55.04% of the time.

The purpose of the study was to find out whether sports training improves multitasking ability:

An ability to efficiently process information is said to improve multitasking performance. That is, if information passes through the bottleneck efficiently and quickly, more information can be processed in a shorter time frame and performance can be maximized.

The athletes also outperformed the non-athletes in a simple test of reaction time — that difference alone is enough to account for the difference in street-crossing success. Of course, there’s a glaring cause-and-effect question here, which the researchers acknowledge:

We speculate that athletes are faster multitaskers than non-athletes, but it is also possible that successful virtual reality street crossers with fast processing speed are more likely to excel at sports.

It’s by no means obvious to me which direction the arrow of causality runs here. I suspect it’s a bit of both. Interestingly, these researchers are also part of the group that has been publishing some very encouraging findings about the effects of aerobic exercise on the brain. Just last month, they published a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper showing that aerobic exercise increases the size of the hippocampus by 2% in older people, reversing the effects of 1-2 years of age-related decline. In this case, cause and effect were clear.

Bottom line: sports skills may help you cross the street successfully, but if you want to remember how to get home again, make sure you’re doing some aerobic exercise.

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How evolution keeps you on the couch

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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Mark Fenske, a neuroscientist at the University of Guelph, has an interesting article in the Globe and Mail about how evolutionary forces on our brains affect our motivation to exercise. His basic argument is that we’re wired to avoid wasting energy, since our ancestors needed to make sure they’d have enough energy to find food or flee from danger. And recent neuroimaging studies (he’s not specific about which studies, by whom, and under what conditions) offer some support for this idea:

When subjects were considering whether to perform a given action, neural activity within one part of the striatum, the putamen, was found to decrease with the amount of physical effort the action would require… By helping to produce an aversion to unnecessary physical activity, the striatum may be partly to blame for the growing number of couch potatoes in Western societies.

Seems fairly intuitive — it would be surprising if we hadn’t evolved some such mechanism. But does this mean we’re incapable of overcoming this barrier to exercise? Of course not:

A number of studies indicate that increasing the reward associated with an effortful action can lead to its being chosen over an easier option. And brain scans show that the size of such a reward is associated with activity in the nucleus accumbens, which is another part of the striatum linked to motivation.

Again, this is quite painfully obvious on an intuitive level, though it’s interesting that scientists are zeroing in on which specific parts of the brain are responsible for these drives. The real pay-off, and the reason I’m linking to the article, comes in Fenske’s conclusion. We can trick the brain and tip the balance in favour of exercise, he says, by reminding ourselves of the well-established mental and physical benefits of exercise:

[B]y learning and thinking about exercise-related rewards we can strategically increase the incentive value of physical activity. This may explain why being reminded of such benefits, and how I always feel better after running than before, is so effective at getting me out the door.

To some extent, that’s what this blog is all about! The more we learn about all the different ways exercise benefits us, the easier it is to get out the door.

(And there’s a postscript too: exercise leads to physical changes in parts of the basal ganglia related to cognitive control. So the more you exercise, the better you get at overcoming your ancient brain’s aversion to “needless” effort.)

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Do sports superstitions really work?

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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My column in today’s Globe and Mail is about sports superstitions — and in particular, about a great study by German researchers showing how well they work (e.g. handing someone a golf ball and telling them that it’s a “lucky ball” makes them hit 33% more putts). I wrote it while I was at the Commonwealth Games in Delhi, which allowed me to ask athletes there about their superstitions, some of which appeared in this sidebar accompanying the story:

Athletic superstitions range from the simple to the ridiculous. Here are a few that were on display at the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, which wrapped up last week:

David Mathie (lawn bowls): Always plays with the price tag on his right shoe.

Erin Marie Roth (lawn bowls): Carries a poker chip with her when playing internationally.
More related to this story

Catherine Dion (gymnastics): Always tightens her right grip before her left on the bars.

Then there are the major league superstitions:

Serena Williams (tennis): Doesn’t change socks during a tournament if she’s winning.

Bruce Gardiner (hockey): Dunked the blade of his stick in the Ottawa Senators locker-room toilet before games to end slumps.

Turk Wendell (baseball): Always chewed four pieces of black licorice while pitching, and brushed his teeth between each inning. Also never touched the baselines.

Jason Terry (basketball): Tries to sleep in a pair of uniform shorts belonging to next day’s opponents, wears five pairs of knee-high socks and eats chicken before every game.

Sources: Psychological Science 2010, mentalfloss.com

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Training three times a day: it’s mental

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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It was a good day at the pool for Canadian swimmers today. More specifically, it was a very good day for swimmers who train with coach Randy Bennett at the Victoria Swim Academy in B.C. Not only did Ryan Cochrane pick up the country’s first gold, in the 400m free; clubmates Julia Wilkinson and Stefan Hirniak picked up bronzes in the 200m IM and the 200m butterfly, and two others from the same group swam in finals — all this on the first day of competition at the Commonwealth Games in Delhi.

So what’s the secret? Hard work, obviously — but not just of the physical kind. After the race, Hirniak talked about a five-week stint of three swim workouts a day over the summer, and how the benefits were as much mental as physical:

I don’t think I would have paid much attention to that kind of comment a few years ago. But the more I read about the latest research into the nature of fatigue and limits of human performance, the more inclined I am to think Hirniak is right on the money with what he says here.

On an unrelated note, I was chatting with one of the Swimming Canada officials about the sports science team they’ve brought with them to Delhi. It’s an impressive contingent, including a couple of physiotherapists, a couple of physiologists, and a couple of biomechanics experts who are filming every lap of every race and producing a rush analysis for the swimmers and coaches every evening. I’m hoping to have a chance to hang out with some of these guys over the next week and find out more about what they’re doing.