By: Lydia Collas

A study by researchers at Brock University which found motivational self-talk to improve physical and cognitive performance was recently featured on time.com, receiving more than 6 million views in 24 hours.

Dr. Stephen Cheung, Professor of Kinesiology and member of the Environmental Sustainability Research Centre (ESRC) at Brock University, and his colleagues wanted to see if athletes could improve their endurance in the heat simply by changing their thoughts. The long-held view is that hard physical limits underlie an athlete’s performance in the heat. But Cheung wanted to investigate how mental, rather than physical, factors affect endurance.

The study, recently published in the January 2017 edition of Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, took a group of trained cyclists and had them ride in 40ºC heat until they reached the point of exhaustion. Following their initial attempt, half the group underwent a course in self-talk training. This is a sport psychology technique that involves replacing the negative messages going through your head as you cycle to exhaustion in a very hot room with positive ones of “I am focused” and “Keep pushing, you’re doing well.”

The average cycling time in the initial ride was eight minutes before exhaustion was reached. The cyclists were then divided into two equal groups, one received self-talk training while the other did not. Cyclists who received the self-talk training extended their cycle for an average of three minutes. The time for the untrained group remained unchanged.

These results challenge the view that hard physical limits underlie performance in the heat. Cheung says of the work “A novel part of the study’s finding that, even in very well trained athletes, their perception of discomfort can still be further trained and improved.”

But it wasn’t just physical performance that improved. the cyclists were also asked to perform a cognitive task that involved finding and remembering the way out of a maze. Cheung found that the self-talk training also improved performance on this task, “It has also never been studied before whether sports psychology impacts mental performance during intense exercise in addition to the physical changes themselves. The combination of both cognitive and physical performance tasks was a novel aspect of the study.”

This research clearly has relevance to athletes wishing to improve their performance. Indeed, Cheung is involved in the training of some high-profile cyclists, “I recently had the privilege of helping top US cyclist Amber Neben develop an individualized heat adaptation protocol prior to the 2016 World Championships held in Qatar. I think I was almost as excited as Amber was when she won gold in the Women’s Time Trial!”

And it’s not only athletes that should take note either, Cheung says “What this demonstrates is that refocusing perception of discomfort can improve anyone’s tolerance to exercise and heat stress. This is of relevance to workers in the heat, such as firefighters, hazardous waste disposal, and ultra-deep miners.”

It cannot go unmentioned that Cheung’s study received a huge amount of attention in the media. Published at multiple new outlets, it was also, to Cheung’s surprise, picked up by time.com: “It still constantly amazes me how broadly my work gets picked up sometimes, through both traditional media channels and also newer media venues.”

As it often is with science, this study not only provided answers to some questions, but also gave rise to a whole host of new questions. Cheung has plans to explore the mechanisms that underlie the effect observed here, “I have colleagues in Belgium who have been seeing that altering the level of dopamine in the brain can also improve an individual’s tolerance to exercise and heat stress. The next step that I am exploring now with a PhD student is to merge these findings and themes of research together, ideally looking at how these sport psychology interventions may or may not affect the neurochemistry of the brain.”

Link to full paper: Effects of Motivational Self-Talk on Endurance and Cognitive Performance in the Heat.