6533b82efe1ef96bd1292903

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Ventilatory responses to imagined exercise.

subject

description

We studied whether the ventilatory responses to imagined exercise are influenced by automatic processes. Twenty-nine athletes produced mental images of a sport event with successive focus on the environment, the preparation, and the exercise. Mean breathing frequency increased from 15 to 22 breaths/min. Five participants reported having voluntarily controlled breathing, two of them during preparation. Twenty participants reported that their breathing pattern changed during the experiment: 11 participants were unable to correctly report on the direction of changes in frequency, and 13 incorrectly reported changes in amplitude. This finding suggests that these changes were not voluntary in most participants and may therefore reveal automatic forebrain influences on exercise hyper-pnea. However, these changes may also reflect nonspecific processes (e.g., arousal) different from those occurring during actual exercise.