The relationship between posthypnotic suggestion and endurance in physically trained subjects

Psychological Determinants of Whole-Body Endurance Performance

“…Confounders were identified in four of the included studies (9 %); in these studies, data were collected at different races [44, 45], posttests were more competitive than pretests [46] or pre-existing groups demonstrated substantial differences in pretest performance [47]. In four studies, it was unclear if the groups were equivalent at pretest [48–51]; two of these studies, however, controlled for pretest performance in the statistical analysis [49, 50]. Nineteen studies (41 %) blinded participants to the research question, three studies used blinded outcome assessors (7 %), three studies satisfied both of these criteria (7 %) and 21 studies (46 %) did not state that they used blinding procedures.…”

“…Hypnotized non-athletes who listened to a motivational passage increased their performance time in an incremental running test, but a control group did not [50]. Participants who demonstrated high hypnotic susceptibility improved their endurance performance (∆ = 0.80), but participants with low susceptibility did not (∆ = 0.13).…”

“…It is difficult to judge the contribution of expectation effects in this review, because only two studies [47, 53] included a placebo control group. Additionally, some of the included studies [39, 50, 54] appeared to heighten participants’ expectations of performance improvement through the wording of the instructions they gave [24]. Furthermore, relatively few studies used research assistants who were blinded to the participants’ allocation, deceived participants about the research question, played down the likely benefits of the intervention (if necessary) or looked at the endurance performance of high-level and motivated athletes in competition; each of these factors might have increased the likelihood of expectation effects in the included studies [83].…”

“…The results shed little light on whether sex [46, 60, 79, 80] or athletic ability [69, 82] are moderating variables. Nevertheless, personality type appears to affect participants’ responses to verbal encouragement [70], participants with high task and ego orientations respond more favourably to goal-setting interventions [59], and hypnotic susceptibility influences whether hypnosis-based interventions improve endurance performance [50]. Further research on moderating variables (e.g.…”

A Review of the Development of Sport Hypnosis as a Performance Enhancement Method for Athletes

“…Their paper showed the value of hypnosis in applied sport psychology and addressed hypnotizability and other factors influencing the effectiveness of hypnotic interventions. Tracing sport hypnosis back to its origins 100 years ago, they described a rich tradition as well as a history of controversy in which despite growing support for the use of hypnosis for athletes, little formal consideration had been given to how hypnosis may be best applied to enhance sport performance [23]. They describe hypnosis as a state of heightened focal attention where clients are able to manipulate and modify attentional focus.…”