Outside reports on a study that finds meditation can have a profound effect not only on your mental wellbeing, but also on your physical endurance and athletic performance:
…[R]esearchers at National Taiwan Normal University led by Yu-Kai Chang … and his colleagues compared two groups of athletes, one of which had experience with meditation, and found striking differences in how they were able to handle mental fatigue and maintain focus during endurance exercise.
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The subjects in the study—24 meditators and 25 non-meditators—were all serious athletes in a mix of sports including track and field, judo, and wrestling. They had an average age of around 20, and trained on average for 16 hours a week. Three quarters of them were male, a quarter female. They had similar performance in a cognitive test that involved remembering a series of digits.
In other words, the two groups were very well matched in all respects except one: the meditators reported spending an average of 41.7 minutes per week meditating, and had been doing it at least once a week for a year or more.
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To find out if there was a link between meditation and endurance performance, the study protocol involved doing a mentally fatiguing computing task (more on that below), then a cognitive task that assessed their “inhibitory control,” then a progressive treadmill test to exhaustion. Inhibitory control is what it takes to stay focused, tune out distractions, and resist impulses that interfere with your goals. In some sense, the mental side of athletic endurance is one big test of inhibitory control—so you can think of the study protocol as a computer-based test of inhibitory control followed by a treadmill-based test of the same thing.
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In this study, the researchers used a task called the Stroop Test to ramp up the mental fatigue in their subjects. A color word flashes on the screen, either RED, GREEN, BLUE, or YELLOW. The letters are displayed in one of those colors, and you have to quickly press a button corresponding to the color of the letters. The catch is that the color of the letters doesn’t match the word (RED might appear in green letters, for example). You have to inhibit your automatic response to the semantic meaning of the word in order to respond only to the display color. This is mentally taxing, and after half an hour has been shown to reduce both mental and physical performance.
In the control condition, the subjects did the same Stroop Test for the same half-hour, but with the colors and words matching so that it didn’t tax their response inhibition. There’s some previous research showing that experienced meditators have better response inhibition, so the researchers hypothesized that the meditation group would perform better after the mentally fatiguing version of the Stroop Test.
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In the control condition (right), which was preceded by the non-fatiguing Stroop Test, the two groups were roughly equal. In the mental fatigue condition (left), the meditators produced almost the same performance, while the non-meditators gave up 4 percent earlier. There were similar results in the computer test that assessed inhibitory control: the non-meditators got worse when they were mentally fatigued, and the meditators didn’t.
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You can read more of the study here, in the Journal of Sports Sciences.