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So convincing are the?health benefits of exercise?that it’s a wonder we do not all run to work every single day. That’s until you think about the problem with exercise, of course: it’s hard, sweaty and uncomfortable.
That’s particularly true inside a hot environment. When you work out within the heat, the body shuttles more blood to the skin in order to help heat escape-meaning less blood flows to the muscles and brain, causing fatigue to set in faster. However, inside a new study, a group of researchers desired to find out if one could overcome the side effects of being inside a hot space simply by considering their sweat session differently.
“If there are changes going on, can we use psychological tools to enhance our ability to tolerate heat and reduce how uncomfortable it can make us?” wondered Stephen Cheung, professor and a Canada Research Chair at Brock University in Ontario, who’s an author from the small new?study?published in the journal?Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. Could those self same tools also make people better exercisers?
Cheung and his colleagues had 18 competitive cyclists do an intense training session in the heat. Nine from the cyclists then took fourteen days to train normally. The other nine received sessions in motivational skills training, a type of self-talk which involves “reframing” negative feelings-like how hot it is-into positive ones. Instead of thinking “My legs are burning” or “I’m sweating like crazy,” they were trained to develop better, empowering phrases like “I’m doing well” or “I can handle this.”
At no more fourteen days, everyone returned to do the hot-exercise test again. The first group saw no alternation in their performance. But the experimental group “improved a huge amount,” Cheung says. They were able to pedal for 25% longer than these were initially, plus they could sustain high amounts of discomfort for a lot longer than their peers. Their body temperatures were also hotter compared to those of their peers, suggesting the brain provides extensive power in determining what lengths the body is able to push itself.
The results aren’t likely to shock athletes, who realize that your brain is truly the first thing to get tired. “It’s really ultimately the brain that lets you down,” Cheung says. “You will go a great deal harder than a lot of times you think you can.” What is surprising would be that the words you tell yourself could make this type of difference. “Even in the face of strong physiological cues to prevent,” Cheung says, “the brain can still override them.”
This article originally appeared on Time.com.
