Tips and Advice

How getting inner monologue right can improve performance. Self-talk, Part 1

Written by Aiden Choles.

· By Bike Hub Features · 0 comments

In his recent book, Endure, the renowned endurance sports writer Alex Hutchinson reflects on his early experiences as a competitive runner (yes, I know this is the Bike Hub, but stick with me here for a minute), saying that if he were to go back in time, he would train differently based on what new science is telling us about the role of the brain in our endurance performance.

He recalls how, some years back, he and his teammates sniggered at the suggestion by their coach that they should talk to themselves differently while running hard. In this little snippet of nostalgia, we uncover why sport psychology and the methods required to train your brain are not more widely adopted – we think they’re laughable, and at times plain stupid. Training our legs and pushing our bodies to their physical limits feels real but having to change the way you talk to yourself feels fluffy. What kind of benefit can there be to our performance by letting these kop dokters loose in our heads?

In 2013 a set of researchers enlisted the help of 24 moderately trained participants and divided them into two groups. The first group received two weeks of training in a method known as motivational self-talk, while the second group didn’t. The participants were then put through their paces in a series of time-to-exhaustion (TTE) tests to see how long they could last for, before the self-talk training and after, while also answering periodic questions about how hard the effort felt. A time-to-exhaustion test is a simple sufferfest – pedal at a set wattage for as long as you can until you can’t anymore. Researchers then measure how long that took you and that’s your TTE score.

In this experiment, the test group (those who received self-talk training) extended their time to exhaustion by an average of 113 seconds over a 10km time trial. The control group had no significant change in their performance. But that’s not all. The test group also reported that the use of motivational self-talk reduced how hard the effort felt. This is in the end why they could go for so much longer. The high-intensity effort felt easier with the self-talk.

Let’s put this benefit in context. It means being able to break away from the group for that much longer to ride competitors off your wheel. It means being able to hold a sprint for the line longer than ever before. It means being able to power down for longer on the way to the crest of a monster climb.

The major challenge in implementing this technique is first realizing that you have an inner dialogue with yourself while riding; that this inner dialogue affects your performance, and finally, that this monologue is more than likely quite negative. The crux of shifting how your psychology affects your performance is realizing that you can change it and that, like your legs, it can be trained.

In next week’s column, we’ll get practical in answering the question of how to implement motivational self-talk. What you can do in the meantime is become more aware of the record that’s playing in your head at different intensities of training and racing. Try and note down what it is that you are saying to yourself when things get tough.

ccs-62657-0-63370100-1519648439.png

About the author: Aiden Choles

Aiden suffers from an Ultra MTB race affliction and has a background in psychology, which means he lies on his own couch, asking himself how it feels. He runs MentalWorks and is passionate about helping athletes overcome their mental demons and redefine what they thought was impossible on the bike.

Comments

There are no comments yet. Why not add yours below.

Add a comment

You must log in to comment