Mind over body: Interfering with the inner voice is detrimental to endurance performance

Abstract

In two preregistered experiments, we investigated whether people were less able to push themselves physically when distracted from using their internal language. In both experiments, participants performed 12 cycling trials (Experiment 1: N = 49; Experiment 2: N = 50), each lasting one minute where participants were required to cycle as fast as possible while engaging in either a visuospatial task, a verbal task or with no interference. Participants performed worse in the verbal interference condition compared with the control condition (Experiment 1: d’ = 0.29; Experiment 2: d’ = 1). Verbal interference was also significantly worse than visuospatial interference in Experiment 2 (d = 0.43) but only numerically worse in Experiment 1 (d’ = 0.29). These differences were likely due to a more demanding interference task format in Experiment 2. These experiments indicate that the inner voice plays an important role in top-down control of sustained physical efforts.

Reframing self-talk in endurance sports using grammatical taxonomy

“…A study (Nedergaard, et al, 2021) found that the content of self-talk, as measured with a version of the Automatic Self-Talk Questionnaire for Sports (Zourbanos, et al, 2009), was predictive of best running time in long-distance running. We also found that interfering with self-talk using verbal interference (Nedergaard, et al, 2022b), causes participants to cycle slower on an exercise bike compared to a non-verbal interference task (Nedergaard, et al, 2022a). This suggests that spontaneous and/or goal directed self-talk is a causal factor in endurance sports.…”

“Stay focused!”: The role of inner speech in maintaining attention during a boring task.

“…It seems to be the case that task-relevant, focused self-talk is recruited under circumstances that are highly demanding, either because the athlete is learning a new sport (Zourbanos et al, 2013), competing against others (Dickens et al, 2018; Thibodeaux & Winsler, 2018; Van Raalte et al, 2000) or under high intensity (Aitchison et al, 2013; Nedergaard et al, 2021). In the first study to test self-talk and physical performance with a dual-task interference paradigm (Nedergaard, Wallentin, & Lupyan, 2022), Nedergaard, Christensen, and Wallentin (2022) found that participants who cycled on an exercise bike while engaged in simultaneous verbal interference were slower than when they were cycling without interference. In dual-task paradigms such as this, a specific negative effect of verbal interference is taken to mean that participants under normal circumstances benefit (in this case in the form of better cycling performance) from being able to talk to themselves (see Nedergaard, Christensen, & Wallentin, 2022, for a comprehensive review of the verbal interference literature).…”

“…In the first study to test self-talk and physical performance with a dual-task interference paradigm (Nedergaard, Wallentin, & Lupyan, 2022), Nedergaard, Christensen, and Wallentin (2022) found that participants who cycled on an exercise bike while engaged in simultaneous verbal interference were slower than when they were cycling without interference. In dual-task paradigms such as this, a specific negative effect of verbal interference is taken to mean that participants under normal circumstances benefit (in this case in the form of better cycling performance) from being able to talk to themselves (see Nedergaard, Christensen, & Wallentin, 2022, for a comprehensive review of the verbal interference literature).…”