Getting distracted can make physical exercise easier – 26/04/2023 – Equilibrium

To make running easier, try to pay attention to anything other than your body. That’s what a study says about the ways we focus while moving that can affect how we feel.

The work was small and involved novice runners, but the results suggest that the more attentively runners “listen” to their bodies, the more taxing running can be, both physically and psychologically. On the other hand, the more runners are distracted from what their bodies are doing by putting one foot in front of the other, the easier the run seems and the better they perform.

These findings could be helpful to many runners about to set off on a marathon or other race. The results could also have implications for anyone wondering how to make exercise more tolerable.

Exercise isn’t always total fun, as most of us know from experience. It can be physically upsetting when we start to move and our heart rate and breathing speed up and our muscles start to complain. It is not entirely clear, however, how best to deal with these discomforts in order to stay motivated and eventually become better at our preferred sport or activity.

Many coaches and other authorities, including training partners and friends, will tell you to pay attention to what’s going on inside you and focus on the physics of your body, including your form and technique. Listen to your breath as you move, someone may have said, count your steps by the minute, or think about the process of lifting your knee with each step.

But some research with athletes suggests that paying too much attention to the body and its mechanisms may be the wrong way to make movement easier and get better at your sport. In a much-cited 2003 study, for example, good golfers played better when they didn’t think about how to hit the hole than when they did, while experienced soccer players effortlessly dribble through cones when their minds wander but tend to swing the ball when they pay attention to their feet. (Football newbies, however, dribbled better when they thought about what they were doing, perhaps because they didn’t know how to dribble yet.)

These results generally line up with a widely accepted theory in exercise science known as the constrained action hypothesis. It suggests that our bodies know how to move better than our conscious minds. The more we concentrate or consciously tell the body what to do, the theory suggests, the less fluid and efficient our movement will be.

This idea was corroborated by other works that involved people practicing different activities. In a 2017 study, for example, 44 volunteers jumped farther during a standing long jump when they focused on where they were going to land rather than correct jumping techniques.

In a 2011 study of weight training, 27 men and women activated their arm muscles more during biceps curls — meaning the workout was more effective — when they weren’t thinking about how to lift the weight than when they did. And in a 2015 survey of competitive rowers, 15 athletes rowed more effectively when they let their minds focus on almost anything but how their legs felt while rowing.

Whether a similar dynamic can play out in endurance sports such as long-distance running is largely unknown. So, for the study, published in 2021 in the Journal of Motor Learning and Development, researchers from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville (USA) and Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran (Iran), decided to see if runners would perform more effectively if they were distracted, compared to if they were tuned in to what was going on in their bodies.

They started by recruiting about a dozen young women. (The research took place in Iran, where studies of male and female volunteers are discouraged, so no male runners participated.) The women were healthy, active, and familiar with running, although none ran regularly. The researchers invited them into their laboratory to check their physical condition and maximum running speed on the treadmill.

Then, on subsequent visits to the lab, the women ran for 6 minutes at a time, at about 70% of their maximum speed, while the scientists monitored their oxygen consumption, the amount of lactate in their bloodstreams and their feelings about the condition. difficulty of each race.

During one of these sessions, the women focused intensely on the muscles in their feet as a way of turning their attention inward. In another, they counted steps, so their focus, still on the body, was broader and more external. On a third run, they counted backwards in threes, taking their minds out of their bodies but not out of their heads. And finally, in a fourth session, they watched a video of a basketball game, a distraction that completely took their attention away from running.

When the scientists compared physical and emotional responses to each run, they found that watching videos easily trumped mindfulness in the body. Women consumed less oxygen and produced less lactate when watching basketball and were more distracted. His race was less physiologically taxing. They also told the researchers that when they watched the videos they felt less tense. On the other hand, the race seemed more difficult when they focused on the muscles, with the other strategies interspersed.

In essence, the worst strategy for runners was “thinking about your movements,” says Jared Porter, a professor of human movement at the University of Tennessee who oversaw the study. A much better option was to think of something else.

As is typical of exercise science, this work was small and the restricted action hypothesis remains only a theory. But as current findings suggest, distractions are likely to make our running more enjoyable and faster, says Porter.

So put on headphones and listen to music or podcasts (while still monitoring the human and vehicle traffic around you for safety, of course). Listen to birdsong or enjoy the scenery while running outside, or watch TV while running on a treadmill.

“We were surprised at how significant the effects were” when people’s minds moved away from their bodies, he points out.

Undoubtedly, many factors influence how effectively we perform in a sport and how much we can get out of our workouts. This study looked at brief runs by young, inexperienced runners. He can’t tell us whether the results apply equally to men, seniors, experienced runners or people in other endurance sports like cycling and swimming.

“But there’s no scientific reason to think not,” Porter points out.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves