“If you can see it, you can do it,” an old cliché that describes envisioning your goals. A new study conducted at Ohio University has taken that saying to the next level, and found that mental visions of exercise possibly play as critical of a roll in muscle growth as actually exercising. The study put casts around participants’ wrists and divided them into two groups. One group would spend five days a week doing mental exercises—imagining their wrists were going curls when they were really still in the cast—the other group did nothing. When the study was over both groups had weaker wrists but the group that did the mental exercises wrists had degenerated less—just 25 percent compared to 40 percent of the non-exercisers. So I guess it is all in your head, or at least around 15 percent.
Mind matters when it comes to muscle strength
More of Today's Solutions
Why the poo taboo has held back a killer disease, and what’s changing
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM There is a disease that kills more than one million people a year, nearly half of them children ...
Read MoreRage workouts don’t calm you down, research finds. Here’s what does.
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Slamming tires with a sledgehammer, pummeling a punching bag, running yourself into the ground when you're furious: the ...
Read MoreEating these 5 “sirtfoods” can support healthy aging
We recently published a story about how eating bitter melon can improve longevity. Remaining within the topic of healthy aging, today we bring you ...
Read More4 things that keep Canadian traffic fatalities lower than the US
While traffic-related fatalities increased in the United States by 19 percent between 2010 and 2020, Canadian rates declined by about the same amount in ...
Read More
