Dr David Hamilton Home Page

Enhancing Muscle (and Life) Performance with the Mind
(www.drdavidhamilton.com)

I have always had a personal interest in enhancing human capability. This has taken me into competitive athletics, where I competed at an amateur level in the UK for 3 years, and into coaching, where I coached young athletes.

I have often noticed that when a person is motivated or inspired they are able to perform much better. When I coached the long jump, a few well-timed words or a little pep talk often saw athletes jump much further than their previous jumps. On one occasion, a 15-year-old boy with a personal best of 6.30 metres (21 feet) jumped 6.56 metres (almost 22 feet) after I instilled in him a little more self-belief.

The capacity to go beyond our normal capability is within the body. The muscles are easily capable of it. We just need to give them the right thoughts. It is our limiting beliefs that usually prevent us from performing much better, not only in sports, but in pretty much everything – school, college, work, relationships, and even our sexual performance. Our beliefs also influence how we communicate and how much confidence we have.

Many of us think that this is just how we are, that this is just how our bodies perform, that it’s in our genes. But not so! Our body’s and minds have more like a range, where our performance at pretty much anything can be from, say, level 3 to level 10. Our limiting beliefs often keep us around the level 3 or 4 mark where our bodies and minds really have the capacity to be 10s. Even intelligence is influenced by beliefs.

In one interesting study, girls were asked to read a paper describing how a gene was found that meant that they were genetically incapable of being as good as boys at maths. Another group of girls, however, were given a paper that said that the ‘boys are better than girls at maths’ thing was just a myth and was merely stereotyping, that it was not true.
Guess who scored best in the next set of maths tests? You got it, the girls who knew it to be a myth. They outperformed the other girls who believed their lack of maths prowess was in their genes. The ability was always there to do well, but their new limiting belief ensured that they did not perform to their potential.

But coming back to physical performance.

A recent study showed that muscle performance was much enhanced when a person thought that they had received caffeine injections, but what was really injected was a placebo. And the people being tested were even much less tired, even though they exerted themselves more.

Among it’s many properties, not least as fuel for writers like myself to work long hours in front of a laptop, caffeine is an ergogenic agent, a substance that can positively influence physical or even mental performance.

Accordingly, it is banned on the athletics circuit, except in really small quantities because many studies have shown that caffeine can enhance a person’s endurance and performance. But what if a person only thought that they were receiving caffeine, but really they received saltwater injections? Would they be stronger and have more endurance? This is what the study tested.
In the first experiment, the scientists administered a placebo but told the participants that it was caffeine (after explaining its ergogenic properties). Then the participants lifted weights using their quadriceps muscle (the muscle responsible for extension of the leg relative to the thigh). Across all participants, the average muscle work increased. They were able to lift more for longer. But, in this experiment, muscle tiredness was not lessened. To make them less tired, the scientists had to work on how much they believed the caffeine would help them.

Conditioning is usually the choice in this type of scenario. In medical studies, a person is given a real substance for a few days, say for pain, then it is secretly swapped for a placebo. Since they totally expect the same effect, the placebo gives them total pain relief, even if morphine was originally used and was swapped for salt water.

So the scientists once again administered a placebo, on two training sessions, telling the participants each time that it was caffeine, but they reduced the weight a little to give the participants the impression that they were stronger. On the third session the scientists administered the placebo but returned the weights to normal and conducted the test.
Not only were the participants stronger and had more endurance than a control group, but they were also less tired, even though they had lifted more overall weights.

So we have the capacity to go beyond our own perceived capabilities. It really starts in our own minds. What if you believed that you could be more confident, or more intelligent, or have a better memory, or be a better lover, or a better writer, or singer, or dancer, or actor, or athlete, or footballer? You can! You just need to believe you can.