Grunting's competitive advantage: Considerations of force and distraction

Abstract

BackgroundGrunting is pervasive in many athletic contests, and empirical evidence suggests that it may result in one exerting more physical force. It may also distract one's opponent. That grunts can distract was supported by a study showing that it led to an opponent being slower and more error prone when viewing tennis shots. An alternative explanation was that grunting masks the sound of a ball being hit. The present study provides evidence against this alternative explanation by testing the effect of grunting in a sport—mixed martial arts—where distraction, rather than masking, is the most likely mechanism.Methodology/Principal findingsWe first confirmed that kicking force is increased when a grunt is performed (Experiment 1), and then adapted methodology used in the tennis study to mixed martial arts (Experiment 2). Lifting the foot to kick is a silent act, and therefore there is nothing for a grunt to mask, i.e., its effect on an opponent’s response time and/or accuracy can likely be attributed to attentional distraction. Participants viewed videos of a trained mixed martial artist kicking that included, or did not include, a simulated grunt. The task was to determine as quickly as possible whether the kick was traveling upward or downward. Overall, and replicating the tennis finding, the present results indicate that a participant's response to a kick was delayed and more error prone when a simulated grunt was present.Conclusions/SignificanceThe present findings indicate that simulated grunting may distract an opponent, leading to slower and more error prone responses. The implications for martial arts in particular, and the broader question of whether grunting should be perceived as 'cheating' in sports, are examined.

The sound of speed: How grunting affects opponents’ anticipation in tennis

“…On the one hand, some argue that grunting constitutes a physiological necessity in order to hit the ball with maximum force. This notion is supported by experimental studies demonstrating that grunting helps increase stroke velocity [10, 11] (see also [12], Exp. 1, for similar findings in martial arts) without causing additional oxygen cost [13].…”

“…After all, grunts are highly salient auditory stimuli having been measured at sound intensities in excess of 100 dB [25]. That grunting may indeed increase response time and accuracy in anticipating opponents’ actions has recently been demonstrated [12]. In this study, participants had to judge whether videos displaying moves of martial arts athletes depicted either high or low kicks.…”

Inertial Sensors for Performance Analysis in Combat Sports: A Systematic Review

“…The highest reported accelerometer operating range was ±750 g and the lowest was ±8 g. Ten of the included records reported strike acceleration as a performance metric. The lowest recorded strike acceleration was ±8 g [22], which is different to the rest of the literature that generally reports accelerations greater than ±20 g [10,12,17,19,20,26,27,38]. The highest strike accelerations were recorded from a turning kick in Taekwondo, which ranged from 97.28 g to 162.94 g [26].…”

“…Researchers used various methods to quantify the effectiveness of a strike. All of the records (16/16–100.0%) assessed strike quality with performance measures such as strike acceleration, strike velocity and strike force [8,10,11,12,14,15,17,19,20,22,23,25,27,28,35,38]. Four of the included records (4/16–25.0%) were also concerned with striking accuracy [8,17,19,35].…”

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“…The modern process of optimizing the training activities requires the development of completely new training programs for power training in MMA. The construction of these programs, adjustment of their structure and the amount of training loads, improvement of the management mechanisms of the training system, must be done taking into account the individual level of athletes' training, the morphometric features of their organisms and the style of fighting (Chernozub, 2016;Sinnett et al, 2018;Slimani et al, 2017).…”