Self-control in Endurance Performance

The ability to endure physical performance over extended periods of time is an important ability in daily life and most prototypically required during athletic activities. In exercise physiology, the capacity to endure strain is commonly studied from a purely physiological point of view, assuming that people work to exhaustion like batteries. Unlike a battery, however, people disengage from a straining activity even when their physiological resources would allow them to continue. To date, most physiological research does not account for this observation and remains silent on possible psychological factors that might explain when and why people decide to disengage.

If you want to investigate the role of self-control as an ultimate limit of endurance performance, don't hesitate to get in touch with maik.bieleke [at] uni-konstanz.de (Dr. Maik Bieleke) for further information. We offer various B.Sc. and M.Sc. theses together with the chair of sports psychology.

Selected publications:

  • Bieleke, M. & Wolff, W. (2017). That escalated quickly—Planning to ignore RPE can backfire. Frontiers in Physiology, 8, 736.
  • Hirsch, A. (2017). Motivational and volitional aspects of athletic endurance performance: A functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) study (Master's thesis). University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany.