How to resist slowing down or stopping during endurance activity
by George Blackwell
One of the biggest barriers for athletes to reach their potential across endurance sports is the psychological stress of managing the discomfort and sensations associated with endurance exercise. An expert opinion paper provides several evidence-based strategies to help endurance participants overcome the urge to slow down or stop during endurance training or competition. These include goal setting, motivational self-talk, relaxation, distraction and pacing. For the sake of brevity, I’m going to focus on the aspect of motivational self-talk, but the others can be found in the article linked below!
The authors refer to self-talk as “what people say to themselves either silently in their head or aloud” (Hatzigeorgiadis et al., 2014; Latinjak et al., 2019). This self-talk may relate to wanting to stop or slow down, particularly when performing at a high intensity or for longer durations (McCormick & Hatzigeorgiadis, 2019). The research on self-talk has been focused on three clusters of questions: describing the self-talk that endurance athletes use, exploring the factors that shape and determine endurance participants’ self-talk, and examining the effects of strategically planned self-talk statements on endurance performance. The latter cluster is especially relevant as it provides evidence that using motivational self-talk can benefit endurance performance, and that it can be taught and executed using brief interventions and without ‘in person support’ at races or in training sessions. Research findings generally suggest that motivational self-talk is a useful psychological strategy for resisting slowing down or stopping – it’s been shown to increase cycling time to exhaustion, improve performance times in a 10 km cycling time trial, increase distance cycled in 30 minutes in the heat, as well as swimming time trial performance in triathletes.
So, what self-talk statements should you use? They can be encouragements or related to the challenge. The specifics need to be tried and tested by athletes in their context in training and racing. Some good examples are a challenge-focused self-talk statement such as ‘My legs are tired, but I can push through it’ or an encouragement related statement such as ‘keep going’ or ‘don’t give up’. I’ve seen great success using short snappy statements or cues with athletes to keep themselves focussed and battle the internal narrative that inevitably crops up during hard training sessions and races. The key for all this to work is practicing and understanding how your mind works when things get difficult. When you’re under pressure, rational thinking becomes exceptionally difficult – this is normally when these cues become the most useful!
To read more on the specifics of each of the statements or other psychological strategies, look at the reference below: