The placebo effect is the feeling of being better that we experience after taking a medication or a natural remedy, but before it has been able to take effect, and that we can also feel when we take a substance without therapeutic properties, believing that it is curative. For example, in blinded clinical trials, randomly divided groups of patients are given the active drug and placebo, without them or the researchers knowing who is taking what, to objectively assess whether the drug is effective. Well, it seems that this effect can also be useful to obtain better results with the practice of physical exercise.
A new study has found, in particular, that people who undergo a training program thinking that it has been customized to suit their individual abilities and needs have higher expectations about the effects it will have and their performance is greater .
“If you believe that the training program you are following has been optimized for you, that in itself will have an effect, regardless of the content of the program. It is exactly the same as the placebo effect that we know from medicine,” said Kolbjørn Andreas Lindberg, a researcher at the University of Agder in Norway and one of the authors of the work, which has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Personalized training: an incentive to exercise
The study involved 40 people who, after undergoing various physical tests in the laboratory, received different training programs. Half of these individuals were told that the training program they had been given had been specially designed for them based on the results of the tests they had taken. This was the intervention group, while the other served as the control group and did not receive this message.
“Those who thought they had received an individually tailored training program did better, even though the two groups had followed the same program on average”
The training programs they all received varied in terms of weight and the number of repetitions they had to do, but on average the programs for both groups were similar. After completing eight to 10 weeks of training, all participants were tested again in the laboratory.
“It turned out that those who thought they had received an individually tailored training program performed better on average than the control group, even though the two groups had followed the same program on average,” Lindberg explains. The researchers found differences between the two groups, particularly with the squat exercise and overall muscle gain.
The researcher points out that it is likely that the participants who thought they were following a personalized program trained a little more and with greater intensity and that this could have affected the results. He further believes that the trial itself may also have played a role because the intervention group may have felt they had to get more involved because the program was supposed to get them results.
“The placebo effect is largely overlooked when investigating exercise outcomes. It can be difficult to conduct a blind study when you are comparing training twice a week to training four times a week,” continues Lindberg, who concludes: “There is good reason to be skeptical of sophisticated new training approaches that are being advertise in the media. Especially considering that virtually no study of this type has been controlled for the placebo effect.”
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