Change of attitude can reduce tiredness

Turns out, your perception has a major influence on how tiring you find exercise as a recent study has found that people find sport less strenuous if they believe it’s doing them good.

“Sport is too much like hard work.” For many, that is reason enough to pass when it comes to exercise. But does sport really have to make you break into a sweat? Researcher Hendrik Mothes of the University of Freiburg and his team 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 produced by a well-known sporting goods manufacturer.

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. They found the training unit strenuous anyway.

These findings are further evidence that the placebo effect works when you do sport. And they show that is it does make a difference what you think about sport and its effects. The results are published in PLOS ONE.