Athletic performance improved by just telling yourself motivational sayings
Summary
- Athletic performance improved by just telling yourself motivational sayings
Details
- A 2014 study at Bangor University tested participants on how long they could cycle until they could go no further.
- Then 2 weeks later they were called back. They were divided into two groups. One group was as before, but the second group chose motivational phrases and told themselves this phrase as tehy were cycling
- The second group significantly improved tehir performance, and the first group were exactly teh same as before
References
Quotes
In 2014, scientists at Bangor University published results from a study into the power of self-talk. Each participant was tested on their ‘time to exhaustion’ – that is, how long they could cycle for before they felt unable to go on. Then, like our previous group of exhausted cyclists, they were left to ruminate for two weeks. This time, however, the second stage was different. When they returned to the bikes after a fortnight, they were divided into two groups. One got a positive self-talk intervention, where they were shown a series of motivational phrases, like ‘You’re doing well!’ and ‘You can push through this!’ and chose four of them to tell themselves while cycling. The other group got no such prompt.
Surely such tiny acts of self-motivation couldn’t single-handedly transform the participants’ performance, the scientists thought. Except it turned out, they could. The group that got the specific ‘selftalk intervention’ ended up significantly reducing their RPE (‘rate of perceived exertion’, or how effortful the cycling felt) at the 50 per cent mark, and noticeably improving their TTE (‘time to exhaustion’) when cycling. The other group performed exactly the same as they had previously. This study shows that simply by becoming your own hype team you can dramatically impact your own productivity. In the years since I read it, I’ve come up with a few specific ways you can do so. My favourite method involves what I call ‘flipping the confidence switch’; in other words, challenging yourself to behave as if you’re confident in your task, even if you’re not