Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights_ - Alex Hutchinson [97]
Can swearing help me push harder in a workout?
If you’re looking for that extra edge that will allow you to lift one more rep or maintain your pace near the end of a tough workout, consider the latest research from psychologist Richard Stephens of Keele University in Britain. After hitting his thumb with a hammer, Stephens let loose with a string of expletives—a common enough occurrence, but one that left him wondering why humans have this nearly universal habit of “cathartic swearing.” To find out, he asked 67 volunteers to dunk their hands in ice-cold water and keep them there for as long as possible. Half of them were told to yell a word from their list of “five words you might use after hitting yourself on the thumb with a hammer,” while the other half chose a word from their list of “five words to describe a table.” Sure enough, swearing significantly increased the length of time subjects could withstand the pain, by 30 percent for men and 44 percent for women—a difference that may have something to do with the fact that women swear less often, Stephens speculates. Swearing also raised heart rates and decreased perceived pain, again with a greater effect in women than men.
The results were actually the opposite of what Stephens expected. Pain theorists had believed that swearing was a form of “catastrophizing” or exaggerating the severity of the pain, but Stephens’s results, which appeared in 2009 in the journal NeuroReport, suggest that something else is happening. Instead, it may be that swearing triggers feelings of aggression that allow us to tap into our fight-or-flight mechanism, pumping adrenaline through our veins and blocking pain. Similarly, Stephens points out, sports coaches often psych their players up with pre-game speeches laden with profanity. Whatever the precise mechanism, the finding that swearing increases pain tolerance explains why evolution has ensured that the behavior survives in virtually all cultures. Most language is generated in the left brain, but swearing appears to arise in the older emotion centers of the right brain: the limbic system and the basal ganglia. So the next time you’re trying to get through the painful part of a race or workout, remember that you have the code words to access this primitive part of your brain—as long as there aren’t any children within earshot.
(Strangely, this isn’t the only study to suggest that expressing your inner jerk can boost your physical performance. In 2010, Harvard University psychologists reported that doing a good deed like giving money to charity, or even imagining doing a good deed, enabled volunteers to hold up a five-pound weight for longer than they could when thinking neutral thoughts. But they gained even greater strength from imagining themselves doing evil deeds like harming someone else—even without swearing!)
Is there such a thing as “runner’s high”?
For decades, the “runner’s high” was the Yeti of exercise science: an exciting phenomenon that lots of people claimed to have seen but that couldn’t be reproduced on demand and couldn’t be reliably documented or measured. The lucky ones described feelings of exaltation, effortlessness, and intense euphoria, usually during or after long or difficult runs, and some attributed it to the mood-altering effects of brain chemicals called endorphins. But skeptics weren’t convinced: University of Michigan researcher Huda Akil, the president of the Society for Neuroscience, dismissed the idea as “a total fantasy in the pop culture” in a 2002 interview with the New York Times.
Endorphins are endogenous morphines, chemicals produced naturally within the body that alter mood and block pain much like opiate drugs such as morphine. Researchers have known for decades that vigorous exercise raises endorphin levels in the blood, but the