What if improving your athletic performance did not require a new training regime, expensive equipment or even eating anything at all? What if, instead, all you needed was… chocolate? (Don’t we all).
A recent study published in Frontiers in Physiology has produced a surprisingly sweet finding (pun intended): simply smelling chocolate may improve exercise performance. Researchers found that moderately trained young men who were exposed to chocolate aromas before and during resistance exercise were able to complete more leg-extension repetitions without reporting that the exercise felt harder.
The effect was particularly striking with dark chocolate. Participants exposed to the aroma of 90% dark chocolate completed approximately 18 more repetitions than those exposed to water, while the milk-chocolate group completed around nine more.
But before we all start carrying chocolate bars into the gym, there is some fascinating biology to unpack.
Our sense of smell is closely connected to brain regions involved in emotion, appetite and motivation. The researchers propose that familiar food aromas may act as learned signals: after years of associating the smell of food with eating, the brain may begin anticipating the physiological and psychological effects of a meal before the food has even reached the stomach. In other words, the brain might be preparing the body for what it thinks is coming next.
Interestingly, dark and milk chocolate appeared to work differently. Dark chocolate was associated with reduced hunger and greater feelings of fullness, whereas milk chocolate seemed to produce more of a pleasant, rewarding sensory experience. Both, however, were associated with increased exercise volume.
So now this brings the question about how much of athletic performance is actually determined by the muscles, and how much is determined by the brain?
It is clear from this research that exercise performance is not simply a matter of muscles contracting; it is influenced by sensory information, motivation, perception and the brain’s interpretation of physical effort.
However, there is an important catch; a scientifically large one. This was a small exploratory study involving only 23 healthy young men, and the researchers did not measure hormones or neural activity. Consequently, we do not yet know exactly why the chocolate aromas produced the effect, or whether the findings would apply to women, older adults, elite athletes or different types of exercise.
So, is chocolate the next great performance-enhancing breakthrough? Probably not — at least, not yet.
But the study demonstrates something arguably more interesting: the boundary between the brain and the body is far less clear-cut than we might imagine. Sometimes, understanding human performance requires looking beyond the muscle and asking what the brain is telling it to do.
And if future research confirms these findings, perhaps the pre-workout routine of the future will involve less caffeine and considerably more chocolate-scented air.
Science, it seems, has a sweet tooth (and it seems so do I).
