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Your mood and thought processes can affect your hormones and other parts of your body. Think of something scary, and you can make your pulse race and your palms sweat.
But if you get chased by a tiger, your pulse is going to race far more, and your whole body will sweat.
There's no amount of thinking you're being chased that equals the effect of actually being chased.
Additionally, working out causes muscle micro tears (from what I understand), which is part of the mechanism for building muscle. Like you said, no amount of imagination will produce the physical effects of exercise.
Tell that to my dreams :-/
How does the tiger do it so well?
You know what will really bake your noodle?
The placebo effect has been shown to work even when the patient was told about it.
As in, the patient went in being fully informed about the placebo effect and it still worked.
And this weirdness also holds for the nocebo effect, where you get a negative/opposite effect that is out of character or excessive to the degree to which the treatment ought to fail or have negative repercussions.
There is research that shows imaging yourself doing exercise for the same amount of time you would otherwise exercise does have benefits.
That sounds dubious.
Nah, there have been legit studies.
It doesn't do much, and nowhere close to what actual exercise will do, but it's better than nothing at all by a small margin.
Iirc, the last study was done back around the turn of the century. I know I was still lifting at the time, and it wasn't long into the noughts that I had to stop doing that seriously.
And, if my memory isn't betraying me, it gives slight increases in benefits with exercise as well. I know that visualizing things in martial arts and other "muscle memory" activities improves performance of skills over not doing it.
Focusing on an idea in your mind regularly is literally mindfulness meditation, which has shit tons of research behind it improving people's psychological and physical wellness
It does sound dubious, but there are good studies on it. You aren't going make great gains, it just shows improvement that going without doesn't. This is why it is also recommended to really focus on lifting and be mindful of the exercise you are doing.
Yeah
Getting jacked is a physical process that requires mechanical damage and healing to individual muscle fibres all over the body in every muscle (unless targeting specific groups only).
Placebo effect is possibly the result of people actively influencing their hormone levels and balance to encourage hormones that promote healing. Specifically increasing serotonin, that we know plays a big role in sleeping, which is where you do most of your healing. Serotonin also makes your entire food to energy pipeline function. More energy allows more energy to be dedicated to healing. Serotonin is also used to create ATP, which activates the muscle fibres.
So I would guess that you could probably increase the speed of getting jacked via placebo effect because your chemical balance is altered to promote serotonin. But you couldn't be sedentary and get jacked. And you could maybe not outpace someone else getting jacked if they're spending more time exercizing than you.
Disclaimer: I am not medically trained, I'm just someone who has been forced by circumstance to learn about the endocrine system and its tyrannical rule over organisms.
Uh, what’s the story behind the disclaimer if I may ask!?
I rolled a natural 1 for END(ocrine function) in the womb and ended up with one of the comorbidities they didn't predict would be unfortunate with covid.
Unfortunately doctors know very little about hormones overall, which ironically makes it pretty easy to cover as a topic when researching possible ways to make your body do... the whole being alive thing. Serotonin happens to be one of the main hormones I'm tinkering with to try to partially unfuck what covid did to my brain.
There is a great long video on this on YouTube from Medlife Crisis who is a doctor at a London university hospital. Well worth a watch.