运动时微笑会发挥得更好？

Many athletes have been told that smiling while sweating will make our efforts feel easier. In May, Eliud Kipchoge, the Kenyan marathon runner, periodically grinned through the final miles of his fastest-ever marathon, which he completed in 2 hours 25 seconds; afterward, he said that he had hoped that the smiling would ease him to the finish line. But there has been little solid scientific evidence to support this idea. Several past studies have examined whether deliberately smiling can alter how people feel psychologically during races, but few have looked at the physiological impact on sports performance.

许多运动员都曾听说，大汗淋漓时微笑一下能使我们费劲做的事感觉更轻松。肯尼亚马拉松运动员埃鲁德·基普乔格(Eliud Kipchoge)在5月创下自己的最快记录——2小时25秒，那场比赛的最后一段路程中，他时不时地露出微笑。赛后他表示，希望微笑能使自己更轻松地跑到终点。但是，目前尚没有什么有力的科学依据可以证明这个观点。过去曾有一些研究试图了解刻意的微笑是否能调节人们在赛跑时的心理感受，但几乎没有研究聚焦于微笑对于体育成绩的生理影响。

For a new study published in September in Psychology of Sport and Exercise, researchers decided to gather a group of experienced recreational runners and have them alternately grin and grimace as they ran. The 24 volunteers, men and women, were not aware of the study’s purpose: They were told that the experiment would look at a variety of factors related to “running economy,” a measure of how much oxygen you use to stride at a given speed.

在《运动与训练心理学》(Psychology of Sport and Exercise)9月发表的一项新研究中，研究人员召集了一批有经验的业余跑者，让他们在跑步时交替作出微笑和扭曲的面部表情。24名志愿者都不知道此次研究的目的：他们被告知，本次试验将考察与“跑步效率”有关的因素，跑步效率以在一定速度跑步时，迈步所消耗的氧气量来衡量。

First, the researchers tested the volunteers’ usual running economy by having them don a facial mask to measure their respiration and then run on a treadmill until they were exhausted. As they ran, the scientists asked them to rate how they felt and describe what strategies they were using to keep going.

首先，研究人员让志愿者们带上一个检测呼吸的面具，要求他们在跑步机上跑步，直到力竭，以此来测试他们正常的跑步效率。研究人员要求他们在跑步时对自身的感受评级，并描述他们会使用何种策略来坚持跑动。

Then, on a separate lab visit, each volunteer completed a series of four six-minute runs, during which they were assigned four approaches: to smile continuously but sincerely, to frown, to relax their upper body by imagining they gently held a potato chip between loose fingers or, as a control, to use their normal attentional focus mental techniques.

接着，志愿者会进入另一个实验室，各自完成四组6分钟的跑步，在这次跑步中，他们会被分配到四种不同的方法：持续地、发自内心地微笑;皱眉;通过想象自己用放松的手指轻轻地拿着一片薯片来放松上半身;以及作为对照，要求他们用自己平时集中注意力的心理技巧。

There were variations in the results. A few runners were most economical when they frowned; the researchers speculate that their grimaces, like ferocious “game faces,” increased their determination to outdo their normal performance. But the runners turned out to be most economical when they smiled. Smiling probably aided economy by prompting a “reduction in muscular tension,” says Noel Brick, a lecturer in sport and exercise psychology at Ulster University, who led the study.

少数跑者在皱眉时效率最高，研究人员推测他们扭曲的面部表情——如凶狠的“比赛表情”——增加了他们超越平常发挥的决心。但试验结果表明，大多数跑者在微笑时的效率是最高的。该研究的领头人、阿尔斯特大学(Ulster University)运动心理学讲师诺埃尔·布里克(Noel Brick)认为，微笑或许能通过促进“减少肌肉紧张”来提高运动效率。

Many of the runners found it difficult to smile throughout the six-minute session, though: Their grins became increasingly fixed and unnatural. Such false smiles activate fewer facial muscles than the sincere version, Brick said, and most likely result in less relaxation and performance enhancements. So the key to using a happy smile to make you a better runner, he says, may be to grin sincerely and often near a race’s end, but in 30-second bursts, rather than continuously. “This is what Eliud Kipchoge seems to do,” Brick said.

不过，大多数的跑者发现，很难在整个6分钟的时段内一直保持微笑：他们的微笑会越来越僵硬、不自然。这样的假笑比真心的微笑激活的面部肌肉更少，并且很可能导致不够放松、对运动表现的改善不大。因此，布里克说，通过微笑来成为一个更好的跑者，关键或许就在于真心地微笑，并且要在快跑到终点的最后30秒冲刺时微笑，而不是一直微笑。