Too tired? It’s all in your head

Researchers at the University of Freiburg, Germany, discovered that one’s own expectations have a major influence on just how strenuous one perceives a unit of sport to be. 

The researchers also found that how the person doing the sport felt about himself or herself played a big role in this feeling of strain. 

Moreover, it can sometimes be smart to enlist help from supposedly useful sports products — if you believe in them. The research team invited 78 men and women between 18 and 32 into the laboratory, where these test persons rode a stationary bicycle-ergometer for 30 minutes. 

Beforehand, they were asked to say how athletic they thought they were. And they were asked to put on a compression shirt. During their exercise, they were asked every five minutes what level of strenuousness they were experiencing. Right before the exercise, the participants were assigned to different groups and shown one of several short films that either stressed the positive health effects of the coming cycling activity, or dampened the expectations. 

“What the participants did not know was that we used these film clips with the aim of influencing their expectations of the coming cycling session,” researchers said. The results showed that the training unit was less strenuous for the test persons when they started out with a positive attitude. 

The more athletic the participants perceived themselves to be, the stronger this effect was. However, positive expectations did not help participants who considered themselves not very athletic. These findings are further evidence that the placebo effect works when you do sport and that is it does make a difference what you think about sport and its effects.