Olympic medals are won by margins of tenths or even hundredths of a second. So, it's no surprise that athletes want any edge they can get — even methods not backed by a lot of scientific evidence.
Like every other treatment or intervention, though, these purported performance-enhancers are subject to the placebo effect — benefits due to the recipient's belief in a treatment. Not only can placebos improve medical indicators, like pain in people who are sick, they can help athletes go faster, higher and stronger.
"The idea that the placebo effect is manifest in sports performance should not be any surprise at all," says Chris Beedie, a reader in Applied Sport and Exercise Science at Canterbury Christ Church University in the U.K. Even very powerful drugs like morphine work better in people who know they're taking them rather than those who don't, he says.
On the other end of the spectrum, he says, are treatments whose benefits are likely to be entirely or almost entirely due to the placebo effect.
Caffeine falls in the middle of that spectrum — proven to be helpful, but also subject to an extra boost that's based on the belief that it is helpful.
For example, in one small study Beedie and his colleagues published in 2006, cyclists who were told they'd received large doses of caffeine generated a bigger increase in power (relative to their baseline performance) than cyclists who thought they'd received small doses. And those who were told they got a placebo did worse than they did in a baseline test. In fact, none of the cyclists in the study had been given caffeine.
Ver:
Placebo effects of caffeine on cycling performance.
On average, Beedie says, the performance boost from a placebo is in the 2 to 3 percent range. But he cautions that the response will vary depending, on the context. For example, a placebo is likely to work better if you know and trust the person who recommends it.It's not clear how placebos improve performance. It might be that they reduce anxiety, which decreases muscle tension and makes movements more efficient and fluid, Beedie says. Or they could reduce perceived pain or effort.
They may simply motivate you to push yourself more, though Beedie says his lab research has found that indicators of effort — like heart rate — don't go up the way you might expect if the person taking the placebo were working harder.
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A.Naddour, U.S. bears the
circular mark of cupping
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Cupping helps heal the USA men's Olympic gymnastics team
What's particularly interesting about cupping, he says, is that because it leaves visible signs, it might also put a damper on the performance of competitors who see the marks and suddenly feel they're at a disadvantage. (Más)
Ver también:
(*) El 'cupping', una tendencia al alza sin ninguna evidencia científica
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