Mind Over Matter: Researchers Uncover a Method to Boost Running Performance

Running faster would be simpler than you think

Whether in sports or not to miss the bus, you may have had the desire to run faster. Change racing techniques, “train more regularly and intense, or even strengthen muscle. Efforts that take time, and not always beneficial.

What if the solution was mental? Indeed, researchers from the University of Essex, England, in collaboration with the Elite Academy of Tottenham Hotspur, discovered that certain words could help us run faster. An effective technique in just a few seconds.

An immediate increase of 3%

In a study published in 2024 in the journal Journal of Sports Sciencesscientists followed 20 players from the Football Academy, aged 14 and 15. They then tested the influence that these words could have on their sprint speed over a distance of at least 20 meters. Before running, the young athletes received various instructions.

The results obtained then showed that the latter ran on average 3% faster after hearing sentences such as “Push the ground”,, “Start like a plane”, or “Shape as if you were a jet peeling in the sky in front of you”. “The words we send to athletes have a tangible and immediate effect on their performance”, said Dr. Jason Moran, a researcher at the University of Essex and the main study of the study.

Focusing on the environment also helps run faster

If this figure may seem relatively low, it is actually significant, since such progress usually acquires after a few weeks of fierce training. The researchers also explained that the attention to the environment also allowed the athlete to be faster.

“We have known for a long time that it is better to direct the attention of an athlete to the environment that surrounds it rather than focus on the positions of his body, which seems to interfere with the fluidity of the movement”, said Dr. Jason Moran. Indeed, many studies have shown that focusing on the internal sensations of the body can lead to excessive conscious management which slows down the execution of gestures, while the attention paid to the effect of movement promotes more natural and automatic control, by lightening the cognitive load during the first stages of a sprint.

If the results have been conclusive in his young footballers, who are used to outdoing himself from Petit, this could be a useful method in any sport or in sports courses in college or high school, as the study authors point out.

Source: Earth.com