The American College of Sports Medicine’s annual mega-conference, which was held earlier this month in Denver, is a great chance to see what questions sports scientists are currently preoccupied with. I rounded up some of this year’s hot topics in running shoe research here. Another topic of perennial interest is the intersection of psychology with sports and exercise science. Here are a few of the ACSM presentations in that area that caught my eye.
Cycling Outside Feels Easier
Pedal your bike at 200 watts indoors, then do exactly the same thing outdoors. It should feel the same—after all, a watt is a watt. But various lines of evidence suggest that outdoor exercise differs from indoor exercise in some subtle but meaningful ways. Perhaps there’s something special about the fractal geometry and saturated colors of natural environments that calls to our nature-starved souls. Or perhaps the complexity of the great outdoors simply does a better job of distracting us from our physical discomfort, much like music or podcasts in our headphones, than the walls of the gym or basement.
One way of testing this idea is to…
