A little deception helps push athletes to the limit:
In a new study, Dr. Thompson tried to find what that limit is.
He used the same method as before: Cyclists on stationary bikes raced an on-screen avatar going a bit faster than the cyclist’s own best time. In one group, the only variable was competition. Cyclists were told that the avatar would be going 2 percent faster or 5 percent faster than the cyclist had ever gone.
The other group was deceived. Each cyclist was told to compete against an avatar that would be moving as fast as that athlete had in his best effort. Actually, the avatar was programmed to race 2 percent harder or 5 percent harder. (A 5 percent increase in power translates into a 2 percent increase in speed, Dr. Corbett said.)
The cyclists in the first group gave up from the start when they knew the avatar would be moving faster than they ever had — even when the avatars were going 2 percent harder than the cyclists’ own best times. Instead, the athletes matched their own best efforts.
As had been observed in previous experiments, cyclists in the second group, who were deceived, kept up with their avatars when they were programmed to perform 2 percent harder than each athlete at his best. But 5 percent was just too much: The athletes kept up for about half the race, then gave up.
In the end, their overall pace was no better than it had been in their best effort without the avatar. Some seemed to do even worse than their previous best effort.
“It comes back to the belief system within the athlete,” Dr. Thompson said. Within limits, if an athlete thinks a certain pace is possible, he or she can draw on an energy reserve that the brain usually holds in abeyance.
One lesson, Dr. Thompson said, is that coaches can eke better performances out of athletes by means of small deceptions.
When an athlete has reached a plateau, a coach might tell an athlete in a training session that the course distance is slightly shorter than it actually is, for example, or that his or her speed at each interval is slightly slower than it is.
The new research suggests that this strategy may bring about an increase in performance, and Dr. Thompson said that it has been used to coach elite middle-distance athletes, although he declined to provide details.
Damn. You keep finding evidence for my positions.