Thoughts emerge from task, personal and environmental constraints during exercise

Appropriate attention focus is crucial to high athletic performance, especially in endurance events, and cognitive strategies have been investigated in psychological interventions [1]. While most authors conceptualise the thinking process as a solely volitional, goal-directed activity [2,3]. others have shown that while at rest and during low/moderate exercise intensity thoughts are flexible and can be voluntary changed, when the demands of exercise increase, thoughts become associative, narrow and rigid [4]. At the exhaustion point the thinking process seems totally impaired and replaced by feelings/emotions urging the termination of the task [5]. Using a dual intrinsic/intentional paradigm we have tested the thought dynamics of trained and untrained males and females while performing different types of exhausting exercises in different environments to show that thought contents emerge spontaneously and are not the sole product of volitional interventions, Consequences on the use of appropriate cognitive strategies during competition will be discussed.