How many times have you been pushing hard in a training session or race when suddenly your mind tells you you’re at your limit? If you can’t shake that thought quickly it can be closely followed by that dreaded sense that your legs are empty and you can’t continue. What if I told you it was all in the mind? That there are ways to trick your brain with positive self talk and imagery that can help you extend your limits. You may think there’s no way this is possible! But there’s scientific research to back it up. Read on to find out more.
I mentioned the work of Dr Samuele Marcora in my last blog post. His interest is in the role our brain plays in limiting physical activity, acting as a “brake” upon performance by influencing our perception of fatigue.
Marcora argues that the limits on endurance activities such as cycling are psychological rather than physiological. He conducted simple laboratory tests where fit athletes were asked to ride to exhaustion on stationary bikes, pedalling at 250W. Typically the athletes would reach a point after around 12 minutes where they felt incapable of pedalling another stroke. They were then challenged to put out another 5 second burst and managed an average 750W for this, even though they initially claimed to be completely exhausted!
Marcora’s work then focused upon ways in which the brain can be “tricked” into pushing out the normal limiters of fatigue. Again in the laboratory, he used subliminal positive images (i.e. presented so quickly that they were not consciously registered) of either happy or unhappy faces and positive or negative words. He found that the athletes presented with the positive images performed around 15% better than those shown the negative messages. Perception of effort was also reduced for those shown the positive images, without them being aware of what they had seen.
Although this technology can’t really be reproduced outside the laboratory (although so called “Smart Glasses” that display visual performance data are on the market and could potentially be used for this purpose) it does suggest that “feeding” the brain with positive messages during extreme endurance could potentially have a big impact on performance. This is something that can be done with positive self talk and imagery. Try to practice this in training, and note what if any effect it has either on performance or perception of effort. The idea of positive self-talk simply means saying phrases in your head like “come on, you can do this, you’re doing well” rather than “God this hurts, I can’t keep this up much longer, I need to stop”. Positive images involve real or imagined scenarios involving success and good feelings.
The other, slightly more complex, suggestion that Marcora makes involves creating changes in the part of the brain that deals with pain and effort, called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). This is done by performing fairly complex mental problem solving tasks, such as mental arithmetic and word recognition, during training which leads to an adaptation in the ACC that enhances our capacity for endurance. Obviously for safety reasons this is limited to indoor training, but the “Marcora effect” can be created by listening to something on headphones that requires concentration, like a complex podcast, audiobook, learning a language or a brain training app (loads of free ones to download). The test is to concentrate on the mental activity but still complete your session. In that respect it is probably limited to sessions or segments up to about 80% of max as above this level it will be very hard to divide attention between both activities.
Finding ways to measure whether this type of activity has a real world effect is much more difficult as there are so many variables outside the laboratory. I would suggest that you give these techniques a try and see if they work for you. Good luck and let me know how you get on!
