#32: What the "Bleep": Can Swearing Actually Improve Performance?

Hi , I'm Dr Bobby DuBois and welcome to Live Long and Well , a podcast where we will talk about what you can do to live as long as possible and with as much energy and figure that you wish . Together , we will explore what practical and evidence-supported steps you can take .

Come join me on this very important journey and I hope that you feel empowered along the way . I'm a physician , ironman , triathlete and have published several hundred scientific studies . I'm honored to be your guide . Welcome my listeners to episode number 32 . What the bleep ? Can swearing really improve performance ?

Well , I ran across a study recently about how swearing improves athletic performance and I thought now this is a really fun topic . And I thought now this is a really fun topic , but as I looked into it , there really are studies that support it and theories as to why it might occur .

This relates to episode number five that we talked about some time ago on mind-body connection , and we're going to explore what that mind-body connection is here Now . The study is fun , the findings are really interesting , but I believe what's really more important truly important is that we can do more than we think . We are more capable than we believe possible .

Sometimes you read stories about how a woman lifts up a car because her loved one is trapped underneath . Well , swearing gives us a taste of how much more we can possibly do , and there's evidence to support it .

So it's exciting , it's fun , and now let's dive in together . Well , why now ? Of course , there's always a story behind the story . I was recently chastised by Gideon , my nine-year-old soon-to-be nine-year-old grandson , that I sometimes swear and , as he says , I shouldn't do that .

Now the question is could this study and what it shows and this podcast episode justify my swearing , absolve me from my sins ? Well , you listeners can decide , and of course , gideon can and his mom can . Well , let's start with a bit of background and something that's more socially acceptable than swearing and that's grunting and , as we'll get into later , actually

the taboo element is really a critical piece of this puzzle , and I'll explain why . Now , if you ever watch tennis and I used to play tennis in high school . Quite a lot you hear grunting nowadays when players hit the ball . Now this probably goes back to Jimmy Connors decades ago . Serena Williams was famous for this .

Maria Sharapova was able to , you know , grunt at about 100 decibels , so pretty , pretty long . And basically what's happening is you're exhaling when you're exerting yourself and it focuses your energy at the moment of contact . Now that's all nice and interesting in theories , but there's actually scientific studies to show that grunting changes your abilities in tennis .

So this is a study of 32 collegiate tennis players , both men and women , and in this experiment , some of the time they grunted and some of the time they didn't grunt , and they measured the speed of their serve and their forehand strokes and they put EMG monitors on their muscles so they could see how much force was being generated .

And lo and behold what did they find ? That with grunting velocity , the speed of the ball was 5% greater and the force they were generating from those muscles increased by 20% . Now it also turns out that when you grunt , it distracts your opponent a fraction of a second , so they can't quite as well tell where the ball might be going .

So this is grunting and it's interesting if you're a tennis player , but this concept of grunting also has been shown to work for weightlifters . So here's a study of 30 men and women about age 25 , and they were looking at hand grip in this study . So how hard can you grip a device and how many pounds of force can you generate ?

And it was a two-second hand grip and they tried it three different ways . One they grunted . Another , they didn't grunt , so there's no big sound . But they exhaled when they did it and , of course , there was a control where they didn't do it . It and , of course , there was a control where they didn't do it .

And what they found is that if you exhaled at the moment you were doing this , you had 11% increase in the force you generated , but if you grunted , it was 25% . Now , that's huge . Like everything we talk about here , the evidence is never as clear as we'd like .

So it worked for for hand grip , but when they did the same exact study or another study that looked at this , it didn't help deadlifts . So is it unique to hand

grip ? Is it unique to tennis ? Well , it didn't generalize to all activities , so there's a wrinkle in this already . Well , let's move on from grunting to swearing . Now there's a couple of pieces of the puzzle here .

Grunting is generally singular , you do it a single time while you're trying to do something forceful , whereas swearing at least as the way it's done in these studies is done multiple times . You swear over and over every couple of seconds . I mentioned this earlier . Grunting is somewhat socially acceptable , whereas swearing is viewed as a taboo .

And there may be a component of the taboo which is really important . Well , what is swearing ? We must define our terms , and that is defined as use of potentially offensive taboo words . Again , this issue of taboo , something that you don't normally say , you're going to say when we do these athletic tests .

Well , this of course , goes back to the Bible , and probably thousands of years before the Bible , where in the Bible it says thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain .

So swearing , or at least that aspect of swearing , was prohibited in the Bible In the year 1250 , one F word , which in this case was fart , was one of the very first times that it was written down . And in the 16th century a monk scribbled the other F word , the bad F word , in the margins of a manuscript .

So it turns out that , although swearing may have been relatively common throughout history . It was almost never written down . That's part of its taboo element of it . Now , the most common swear words which may or may not be your most common swear words are the F word and the S word , and in these studies they asked the folks to think

of what you might say if you stubbed your toe or hit your head really hard . So each person would choose their taboo or swear word of choice . Choose their taboo or swear word of choice .

Now , before we get into the strength element and this is going to be very important because we're going to talk about the theories of why this might occur , and if we can't come up with any good theories , then I don't know what to make of the evidence .

So there's been a number of studies in the psychological literature that swearing increases your pain tolerance and keep this in mind , because we're going to come back to this concept in just a bit and some of these studies did something very interesting . Of course , they had the control where you didn't say anything .

Then you had , of course , the swear word of choice , but then they made up what sounded like a swear word . In one of the studies that word was fouch , and so they would utter that in a very loud way , but of course that's not a taboo word , and so it was a way of testing whether it was the word itself or the taboo element of it .

Now , there's many different types of testing of pain tolerance , but in this case they submerged the subject's hand in ice water and they asked the subjects two different things how quickly did you detect pain ? And then , secondly , how long could you keep your hand in that ice bath up to a certain limit that they set ?

And what they found is that , if they swore , they could increase their physical tolerance to pain by 20% or more . And it really happened and really worked well when it was an actual taboo swear word as opposed to the made-up one . Well , now we get to the study of interest . Now , this is actually one of those studies ,

of studies , or a review article , and they asked the question is there an impact of swearing on athletic performance ? Now , they had a swearing protocol . Of course you have to have a protocol . So the test they were doing was the strength you could do for 30 seconds .

Sometimes they did hand grips , sometimes they did a cycling where you'd be on a sort of stationary bike and you would pedal all out for 30 seconds and in the protocol many of them would have you swear every three seconds , so it wasn't just a one and done . You would swear . A couple seconds later you would swear again .

A couple seconds later you would swear again . Sometimes you would swear 10 seconds before you started this whole protocol . And they did it just like they did with the ice water bath , where sometimes you didn't do anything , sometimes you uttered a made up what sounded like a swear word and then , of course , the actual swear word swear word .

Well , they found that it worked . That swearing made a huge difference . That power increased by four and a half percent . On the bicycle the grip went up eight percent . Chair push-ups went up by 15 percent . A wall sit how long you could sit next to a wall 22% . And then the length of time you could do a plank went up by 12% .

Now , these 5 , 10 , 15% improvements let me put that into context . If you're an elite weightlifter and you're working out all year long , you might hope you could increase the amount of weight you could lift by 3% and the swearing was increasing by 5% , 10% , 15% .

If you look at Olympic sprinters and you compare in the 2024 Summer Olympics , the difference between the first place sprinter of a hundred meter race versus the eighth place was 1% difference , and here swearing is giving five or 10 times that in terms of power output . Well , here's another wrinkle . There's always wrinkles .

There's a wrinkle , like it worked with grip strength but didn't work with a deadlift . If you are a regular swearer now I don't remember what they exactly defined as a regular swearer , but we can just assume they swear regularly it wasn't as effective .

So again , this comes back to this taboo element that if you are never a swearer , then when you say that bad word , that's taboo , that brings up something in our brains , whereas if you swear all the time , it doesn't seem to have the same effect .

Well , you know , I love evidence , but for me to believe that this is a real phenomenon , yes , the evidence is critically important , but I want to understand . Is there a plausible theory ? Because if I can't explain it then I don't know what to make out of this . So here's a number of studies that tried to explore what the issue was

, and there are three reigning theories as to why swearing might increase your pain tolerance or might increase your strength in a test . The first is physiologic , that when you utter these words , there's a sympathetic response . Your heart rate might go up , your blood pressure might go up and that might prime you to do this much greater effort .

Well , when they've done that and they measured these things , no difference , all right . So that theory is interesting , but doesn't seem to be the operative one . Well , the second one is psychological arousal . The theory is now there's not a lot of evidence here is that when you swear , it in essence wakes your brain up . You're more confident , you're more excited .

Perhaps you're distracted and the thought is the amygdala , which is your emotional center in your brain . There might be activation there , but I'm not sure anybody's done this study with a fast MRI scan to show it .

In essence , maybe your brain is saying well , let's throw caution to the wind , as I am already throwing caution to the wind by swearing , and I can let myself go with this athletic attempt .

The last one , which I actually think may be the most important although the throw caution to the wind I think has some appeal as well is that it increases your pain threshold . We talked earlier about the ice water bath and how we definitely found that swearing increased your ability to tolerate pain with the ice water bath .

But when you think about a very difficult exercise challenge , there's pain associated with it . We typically pull back from something that's painful . So maybe the taboo word , the grunting with that taboo word , distracts us , increases our pain tolerance and therefore we can do more . This seems very compelling to me . Well , I wanted to test it in myself .

Now , I didn't go to a public gym and swear and see what happens . I figured , well , that's probably not something good , they'll probably kick me out . But I did my own N of 1 study , and that was I went for a run . Now , it wasn't exactly the 30-second burst of athletic energy , but I was getting tired while I was running .

It was feeling painful and I tried grunting every couple of seconds . Well , that didn't do very much . I then experimented with the fake word . I tried the fouch as a fake swear word . Nah , that didn't do much for me . But then I tried a couple of choice swear and , believe it or not , for me it helped . I was momentarily distracted .

You know , what came out of my mouth was something that doesn't normally come out of my mouth and I was focused for a moment on that , like , ooh , I just said that . And when that happened . For a short period of time I was distracted . I was not aware of the discomfort . Then , of course , a few seconds later or so , the discomfort came back .

I didn't feel like I could run quite as strong and I would repeat it , and it worked a number of times . So for me , in my end of one study , it corroborated the pain tolerance of the ice bath work and corroborated the findings of the studies I've talked about . Now keep in mind , as I've said a few times , it's a taboo .

You're not going to be allowed to swear in the gym , and it turns out that if you just quietly swear , or you swear internal to your brain but don't utter the words , it doesn't quite work . So it really has to be something that you

say often , you say it loudly , for it to work . Well , this very fun episode , or at least a fun episode for me , is coming to an end .

This was a really enjoyable study , not because it talked about something that we all can probably laugh a little bit about , probably laugh a little bit about , but the deeper message is that we perceive limits in ourself in so many aspects of life .

And , as I talked about the car and the lifting of a car and I hope none of you ever have to be faced with that situation . But what that tells us is that there's more to our capabilities than we believe possible and , as we talked about , at least one or two of the theories support why this may occur .

I encourage you to try your own N of 1 study and if you've forgotten how to do that , by all means go to episode 27 or go to my website , and all of these things are written about in various blogs . I believe , as a parting message , that you are more powerful than you think you may be .

This tiny little set of studies gives us a window into that , which I hope you will try out and carry with you . May you live long , well and powerful , knowing that swearing may make you even more powerful than you thought you were capable of doing . Thanks so much for listening to Live Long and Well with Dr Bobby .

If you liked this episode , please provide a review on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen . If you want to continue this journey or want to receive my newsletter on practical and scientific ways to improve your health and longevity , please visit me at drbobbylivelongandwellcom . That's , doctor , as in D-R Bobby . Live long and wellcom .