Today we dive into why psychology matters in a physical pursuit like running.
Everything we do starts in the brain. From the initiation of movement to maintenance of effort during a run, from the setting of a goal to its long-term pursuit, our minds are involved in what we are doing at any moment in time. But the question is: how are they involved?
In this post we hope to share with you some scientific findings that demonstrate the relevance of psychology to what we do in our sporting and exercise activities.
Let’s imagine I decide to go out for a run. Psychology has already come into play because I have set an intention. How did I get to that point? Intentions tend to be formed based on the kind of experience and outcomes we anticipate, which are in part influenced by our past experiences - or more importantly how we interpreted those past experiences - and also other ideas that we pick up from elsewhere. We build pictures in our minds of how things will be, perhaps based on attitudes of people around us, the way we currently see ourselves, things we read and see in sources of media, or simply our own daydreams.
But intentions are also influenced heavily by how we feel when we set them. For instance, if we feel tired and stressed, we often perceive effort as more costly and therefore we may be less inclined to do something physically effortful, because we anticipate a more uncomfortable experience and a less desirable outcome. Emotions, fatigue and stress do not just evoke feelings - they can hijack and coordinate our entire experience. The result can be that we act in ways that are contradictory to our original intentions or our conscious motivation.
To add to that, these anticipated outcomes and experiences can’t all be put into words - some are conscious, articulable ideas, whereas others are just gut feelings. So there we have two different levels of psychological experience feeding our decisions - those we are aware of, and those we are unaware of.
But getting back to intentions themselves, research shows that they do predict subsequent behaviour to an extent, so that’s a start. However, studies have shown that this relationship is quite weak. As an example, a meta-analysis found that on average people follow through on their intentions to exercise only about 49% of the time. This is what is termed the intention-behaviour gap.
So what does this mean? It means that conscious intentions in isolation do not have the power we think they do. This is because there are other psychological processes at play that we are unaware of, and the way we form intentions is often lacking in detail or consideration of our wider context. This leaves us with one of the biggest challenges that many people face in the exercise world: participating as much as or in the way that we want to participate. We struggle to control our behaviour, and this is where psychology can come in to help.
And that’s not just the case for those of us who struggle with motivation - I’m sure many of you more competitive runners may resonate with the experience of avoiding a race or holding back out of fear of failure. Or perhaps you have a warm-up strategy but every time you get anxious before a race it goes to pot and you find yourself on the start line in a suboptimal condition, both physically and mentally. You want to put yourself out there and compete to the best of your ability, but the emotional parts of your brain have another agenda.
But let’s park the intention-behaviour gap for a moment and imagine that I do follow through on my intention to go for a run.
Let’s first consider the movement of running. It is initiated and controlled by the brain, which is constantly integrating all sorts of information from your visual and vestibular systems, sensory cells and conscious thought processes (amongst many other things) in order to keep you going smoothly. You might be wondering “what is the relevance of this kind of detail?” There are various ways in which it can be relevant, one being that this automatic processing can be disrupted by what you are focusing on. Research has found that maintaining a detailed and internal focus of attention - for example, focusing on the specifics of your stride - can disrupt the automatic control of your movements via excessive conscious processing. Of course sometimes we need to do this if we are trying to improve our technique and build new patterns (hello triathletes!), but if we are just trying to run as efficiently as possible in the present moment, we are best off leaving it to our brain’s automatic processes, which can be disrupted by over-analysing or focusing on granular internal processes.
But let’s say you don’t care about efficiency - perhaps you run to keep fit and healthy and your speed and performance aren’t top priority. How else might your mind’s activities be relevant?
Because they affect the experience of the run, and hence the enjoyment. And research shows that it is the experience you have during exercise that best predicts long-term adherence, more so than how you feel afterwards.
Imagine I start out on this run and I feel pretty sluggish - everything feels like harder work than normal, the rain starts coming down and it doesn’t get any better as time goes on. Where do my thoughts go? What is their impact? How do I feel about continuing under these circumstances?
The way we react to challenges within the run - be that simply feeling a bit tired and getting rained on, or being off a target pace, or feeling self-conscious in front of passers-by - impacts the experience of the run. The thoughts and emotions we have and how we evaluate them can influence how we feel about running more generally. Now let’s think back to our intentions - if we get into a pattern where we have an overly unpleasant experience every other time we run, we then learn to anticipate that kind of experience, which makes it harder to be consistent in getting our runs in.
Again, this kind of challenge applies to runners of all levels and goals. Let’s say you’re a competitive runner - if you have multiple races in a row where you feel incredibly anxious before the start line and the whole race feels like a battle, this again can become a pattern that influences how you feel going into future races, and therefore what you do and ultimately how you perform.
But let’s back-pedal a bit and imagine the run is going fine, there are no particular challenges, but I’m doing a hard run which necessarily involves pushing my physical limits. The physical sensations that come with running at intensities beyond a certain threshold are inherently uncomfortable, so you may find it helpful to know that it is almost a universal given that negative thoughts and feelings come with this. While there are a few people who seem to breeze through experiences of physical fatigue and discomfort, most of us will find ourselves wrestling with varying degrees of negatively valenced thoughts and feelings.
This is natural - despite our conscious goals and our bodies’ willingness to comply, there comes a point where our muscles and cardiovascular systems are working so hard that our brain starts to warn us that we are running out of resources and this is becoming pretty painful, so perhaps we should stop. Our brains have evolved to automatically (unconsciously) weigh up the costs and benefits of physical effort, and once the costs are perceived to outweigh the benefits, our brains will send various signals suggesting we stop. But of course if I'm trying to run as fast as I can, I have to be able to resist this urge to slow down or stop (within reason, being mindful of the risk of injury), and to deal with the discomfort of this in a way that feels helpful. Furthermore, the way I react to having these natural but uncomfortable thoughts and feelings plays a big part in what happens next.
We will bring this discussion to a close with one more example. Let’s say I have done a tempo run where I’m trying to push myself and I fall short of my target time. This is naturally disappointing, but what we do in the midst of this disappointment can have a big impact on us. There are countless different ways in which we can interpret the result of a run, some of which are helpful and others unhelpful. This matters because the conclusions we draw about the run, and therefore about ourselves and our future runs, have a knock-on effect on how we feel and act later.
So all in all, we can consider our minds to be the mediators of our experiences, determining what we take from them and what we do next. And this is why psychology matters - our minds can either be obstacles that stand in the way of us doing what we care about to the best of our abilities, or they can be resources that help us make valued choices that build and take us towards the life we want to live.
Chloe
Psychology of Movement

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