Tag: mental

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Pay no attention to your form: how to improve running economy

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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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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.

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Faster tunes make you bike faster, even if it hurts a bit more

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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Researchers have been studying how music and other “distractions” affect exercise performance for decades (see here, for instance), hoping to trick us into pushing a little harder without realizing it. One of the factors they’ve looked at extensively is the speed of the music — the idea that faster tempos make us pick up the pace. The problem is that the effects of tempo tend to be swamped by the effect of whether the subjects in the experiment like the particular tunes selected for them. There’s a neat study that gets around this problem that just appeared online, in advance of print, at the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, by researchers from Liverpool John Moores University in Britain.

Basically, the researchers had subjects cycle for 25 minutes as hard as they chose, while listening to a set of six songs. They repeated the experiment three times with the same songs each time, with one catch: unbeknownst to the listeners, the music was sped up by 10% in one trial, and slowed down by 10% in another trial. This eliminated the question of whether the results were being skewed because, say, everyone really loved the Glenn Frey track.

As expected, the subjects biked a few percent faster and harder when the music was faster, and performed worse when the music was slower. Here’s the interesting twist: it wasn’t that faster music somehow numbed their pain and allowed them to work harder with no extra effort — their “perceived exertion” ratings were higher too.

That is, [the researchers write,] healthy individuals performing submaximal exercise not only worked harder with faster music but also chose to do so and enjoyed the music more when it was played at a faster tempo.

Remember the old tape players that had adjustible speed (so you could fine-tune the pitch of music)? Wouldn’t it be nice if MP3 players started including a little knob where you could fiddle with the speed of playback by a few percent in either direction, so that you could give yourself a little boost late in a workout?

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Aerobic exercise makes you smarter than weightlifting

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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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A nice post by Gretchen Reynolds at the NYT Well blog goes beyond the usual “exercise makes you smarter” to investigate what kind of exercise, exactly, boosts IQ most effectively. Key result from one study:

The students were noticeably quicker and more accurate on the retest after they ran compared with [lifting weights or sitting quietly], and they continued to perform better when tested after the cool down. “There seems to be something different about aerobic exercise,” Charles Hillman, an associate professor in the department of kinesiology at the University of Illinois and an author of the study, says.

And a result from a more recent study:

[T]hey allowed one group of mice to run inside their rodent wheels, an activity most mice enjoy, while requiring the other group to push harder on minitreadmills at a speed and duration controlled by the scientists. They then tested both groups again to track their learning skills and memory. Both groups of mice performed admirably in the water maze, bettering their performances from the earlier trial. But only the treadmill runners were better in the avoidance task, a skill that, according to brain scientists, demands a more complicated cognitive response.

So, at first glance, it looks like aerobic exercise has the edge, and the harder the better. This jibes with a study I wrote about in July showing that aerobic exercise developed better blood vessels that got more oxygen to aging brains. On the other hand, if you push too hard during a marathon, your memory actually gets worse — temporarily.

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Running marathons makes your memory worse…and better

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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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!]

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Why you should swear for a better workout or race

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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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.]