Believe something positively affects your performance, practically anything, and it can actually enhance your performance, that’s what Brad Stulberg writes in a blog post for the Science of Us blog at the New York Magazine website.
Stulberg includes a point made by David Martin and Shona Halson that “the exercise-science community should stop overlooking the ‘fake effects’ associated with placebos and instead start using the ‘very real effects” associated with belief.'”
While athlete performance sees what it wants to about belief systems there are research sociologists who have advanced the understanding of interpersonal relationship networks on what an individual believes. What someone believes, according to research by Noah Friedkin of the University of California-Santa Barbara, is interdependent and subject to change through interpersonal influence. “Beliefs are buttressed by those who share them,” Friedkin told the UCSB press office.
For athletes in their teens or even in their twenties, the amount of social development they will experience stands to make any belief-based improvement strategy unpredictable and, likely, unreliable.
Developing good habits would seem to be a sounder approach for short- and long-term athletic improvement. See:
Better still is deliberate practice, according to Anders Ericsson, who describes the process of work, coaching and improvement in a long interview with author Daniel Pink on the Healeo website.
More things that I read and liked last week: