Curse Your Way to a Better Workout
We’re all familiar with the stereotype of the muscular jerk that kicks over sandcastles and just seems to take great pleasure out of being a thorn in everyone’s side. They’re a rude, crude, but uh, no thank you dude that has to be in amazing shape presumably because he has to have one redeeming quality. What about the girl that has that perfect treadmill run down but looks like if you tried to talk to her she’d bite your head off? Why are these people always being portrayed as rage monsters when exercise is supposed to give you endorphins and make you feel happy?

What’s the connection between aggression and exercise?
Well a 2010 study by Harvard University seems to show that there is actually a benefit to embracing your inner demons while you exercise. The study challenged volunteers to hold up a weight while coming up with a fictional story about themselves. The catch? Participants were each assigned a different condition for the story, you’re either the hero, the villain, or in the control group writing yourself as a neutral character. What they found was that while just imagining yourself as an altruistic good person helped to increase physical performance, imagining yourself as the bad guy harming someone showed the most significant increase in ability.

The theory is that by imagining yourself as the attacker it in turn makes you feel more aggressive and changes your mindset and hormone production to be more ready to fight. This puts your body in a better state to perform tasks that require endurance. Imagining yourself as the hero helps you have a state of mind that believes it can accomplish great things, giving you a sense of potential and helps you to encourage yourself, but the results are less profound because the adrenaline response is less pronounced.
Still not convinced? How about this research by psychologist Richard Stephens about the power of swearing? For this study volunteers held their hands in an ice bath for as long as they could stand it. One group shouted words that they would use to describe a table (I’m sure those words were thrilling…), the other swore like sailors for the experiment. The foul mouthed volunteers could withstand the ice bath much longer, showing that swearing helps us to perceive pain as less intense. Furthermore, Stephens went on to complete other tests on the power swearing has on our physical abilities, testing participants on exercise bikes and in handgrip tests. He demonstrated once again that there was a boost in performance in the group that cussed their hearts out.

So how do bad words equal a great workout? Well Paleo fans rejoice because this actually seems to be a leftover shortcut to the primitive survival part of the brain, that good old fight or flight response. You see, when you say those words your mother told you not to say, it triggers feelings of aggression and- unlike most language, stimulates the emotion side of your brain instead of the logic side. This primitive part of your brain does a better job of bringing out top physical performance and helps to stimulate adrenaline production and increases your heart rate. This is also why almost every culture on the planet swears when we stub our toes, it’s for survival!
Exercise has long been lauded as a great way to deal with aggression in a controlled way, burning off that extra hostility and anxiety and leaving you feeling calm and serene. There are of course cases where stimulating this response purposefully can make us work ourselves up and not come down when we should. So please remember that if you’re looking to either give yourself an edge on your next workout, or are looking for a healthy way to relieve anger that it’s important that you maintain control. Don’t let your temper get the best of you and if you feel like the workout you’re doing is winding you up in the wrong way, switch to something that’s more relaxing while still being physical like swimming or hiking.

I love this idea of being able to embrace my inner monster and just leave it all on the weight rack or out on the trail. I know there have been many times that I went to exercise specifically because I needed to be in my own head-space for a while and work through some things. It also makes me feel like when I’m having a bad day and I’m ready to punch someone right in the throat that it’s probably a good day to set some new bests on my workout. So the next time you’re trying to push through that last set and you need a boost let your imagination run wild on your enemies and let the profanity fly (responsibly of course!).
