Back in 2018, I wrote an article about some new research showing that mindfulness training could improve mental and physical performance in elite athletes. It was a heady time for mindfulness, and my article was just one in a frothing sea of hype about the practice. The hype has quieted down since then—interest has dropped by about a third since 2020, according to Google Trends—but the evidence that mindfulness and other forms of meditation have real benefits continues to quietly accumulate.
The latest example: a new study in the Journal of Sports Sciences from a team of researchers at National Taiwan Normal University led by Yu-Kai Chang. 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.
What the Study Tested
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…
