From couch to ultra-marathon – mental imagery technique can aid running challenge completion

A motivational intervention known as functional imagery training (FIT) can help self-professed non-runners to complete an ultra-marathon (50km plus), according to new research.

The study, led by the University of Plymouth, started by examining the motivation of 31 non-runners who wanted to get fitter, by giving them a recognised behaviour change technique, often used by counsellors, known as Motivational Interviewing (MI). Participants were then left for five months to do whatever they presumed would benefit their fitness and health. After this period all were contacted and asked if they would consider completing an ultra-marathon.

Fifteen participants went on to express an interest in attempting an ultra-marathon as they continued to improve their fitness. Seven were randomly assigned FIT, while eight continued with just MI.

MI is a technique that sees a counsellor support someone to develop, highlight and verbalise their need or motivation for change, and their reasons for wanting to change. Functional Imagery Training builds on MI, as it teaches clients how to elicit and practice motivational imagery themselves, with participants encouraged to utilise all their senses to visualise how it would feel to achieve their goal.

Of the eight participants in the MI only group, four started the race, and two finished. Meanwhile, all seven of the FIT group started, and six finished -- showing that those assigned to the technique were five times more likely to complete the challenge.

While researchers acknowledge the small population size, the study, published in the Journal of Imagery Research in Sport and Physical Activity, adds to the growing body of evidence that FIT can significantly reinforce a person's motivation to complete a challenging goal.

FIT has also previously been shown to boost weight loss, with another Plymouth-led study showing that overweight people who used it lost an average of five times more weight than those using motivational interviewing alone.

Developed at the University of Plymouth, FIT is a unique approach to behaviour change that uses mental imagery to motivate change.

It teaches people new ways of thinking about their immediate future to help them stay motivated as they achieve each small step towards their goal -- with users describing it as a 'mindset shift', where they exercised because they wanted to, rather than feeling they had to.

For example, at difficult points in the race, a participant in the new study -- a teacher -- pictured the conversation they would have at work on Monday morning: visualising the staff room, holding a coffee in hand, imagining the smell and the taste, talking about the challenges with a peer, then using this self-developed image to imagine the feeling at the finish line, as they go from little exercise to ultra-athlete.

Lead author Dr Jon Rhodes, who has worked with professional athletes to improve their resilience, said: "An ultra-marathon requires a huge amount of mental, as well as physical, strength -- even from people who run regularly. Trialling Functional Imagery Training on historically self-professed non-runners was a real test of its efficacy, and to see that it made a difference was a promising finding.

"It shows that multi-sensory imagery is the key difference between those who reach the starting line and then go on to finish, and those who do not -- showing it is critical to maintaining changes and pushing the boundaries of physical and mental performance."

Melissa King, aged 38 from Newquay in Cornwall, was allocated the FIT intervention as she prepared for the Exmoor Ultra Marathon earlier this year. Completing the event successfully, she said: "My honest reason for starting running in the first place was just to see if I could do it.

"FIT has been a huge mindset shift, and I now use imagery as a way to reset; to ground me and help me to focus on being present, appreciating why I am here while also prompting me to cue my immediate, medium- and long-term goals. Having never run before, my ultimate aim is now a running trip in South America which will take a couple of months. It's in three years' time, so I'm starting training early and really embracing the challenge."

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Key mental abilities can actually improve during aging

It's long been believed that advancing age leads to broad declines in our mental abilities. Now new research from Georgetown University Medical Center offers surprisingly good news by countering this view.

The findings, published August 19, 2021, in Nature Human Behaviour, show that two key brain functions, which allow us to attend to new information and to focus on what's important in a given situation, can in fact improve in older individuals. These functions underlie critical aspects of cognition such as memory, decision making, and self-control, and even navigation, math, language, and reading.

"These results are amazing, and have important consequences for how we should view aging," says the study's senior investigator, Michael T. Ullman, PhD, a professor in the Department of Neuroscience, and Director of Georgetown's Brain and Language Lab.

"People have widely assumed that attention and executive functions decline with age, despite intriguing hints from some smaller-scale studies that raised questions about these assumptions," he says. "But the results from our large study indicate that critical elements of these abilities actually improve during aging, likely because we simply practice these skills throughout our life."

"This is all the more important because of the rapidly aging population, both in the US and around the world," Ullman says. He adds that with further research, it may be possible to deliberately improve these skills as protection against brain decline in healthy aging and disorders.

The research team, which includes first author João Veríssimo, PhD, an assistant professor at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, looked at three separate components of attention and executive function in a group of 702 participants aged 58 to 98. They focused on these ages since this is when cognition often changes the most during aging.

The components they studied are the brain networks involved in alerting, orienting, and executive inhibition. Each has different characteristics and relies on different brain areas and different neurochemicals and genes. Therefore, Ullman and Veríssimo reasoned, the networks may also show different aging patterns.

Alerting is characterized by a state of enhanced vigilance and preparedness in order to respond to incoming information. Orienting involves shifting brain resources to a particular location in space. The executive network inhibits distracting or conflicting information, allowing us to focus on what's important.

"We use all three processes constantly," Veríssimo explains. "For example, when you are driving a car, alerting is your increased preparedness when you approach an intersection. Orienting occurs when you shift your attention to an unexpected movement, such as a pedestrian. And executive function allows you to inhibit distractions such as birds or billboards so you can stay focused on driving."

The study found that only alerting abilities declined with age. In contrast, both orienting and executive inhibition actually improved.

The researchers hypothesize that because orienting and inhibition are simply skills that allow people to selectively attend to objects, these skills can improve with lifelong practice. The gains from this practice can be large enough to outweigh the underlying neural declines, Ullman and Veríssimo suggest. In contrast, they believe that alerting declines because this basic state of vigilance and preparedness cannot improve with practice.

"Because of the relatively large number of participants, and because we ruled out numerous alternative explanations, the findings should be reliable and so may apply quite broadly," Veríssimo says. Moreover, he explains that "because orienting and inhibitory skills underlie numerous behaviors, the results have wide-ranging implications."

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