Men’s Fitness UK – October 2019

SEPTEMBER 2019 35

ith just three little words you can

paint some powerful pictures.

“She said yes” brings us a feeling

of joy, an un-squashable smile

and a shiny diamond ring; “We

did everything” invokes doctors’

scrubs, a lonely waiting room

and many tears to come; ‘Bus

Replacement Service’ induces dread.

Advertisers are well attuned to this power. In the UK

we grew up knowing to cross a road we must ‘Stop, Look,

Listen.’ Aussies grew up having to ‘Slip, Slop, Slap’, and

across the world most of us know that Nike wants us to ‘Just

Do It’. Great speeches are full of three-word statements,

whether it’s Obama with his 'Yes we can' or Shakespeare’s

‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen,' ese phrases that shape

our culture are powerful for a purpose. Our brains have

a craving for rhythm, simplicity and patterns. ree, the

smallest number required to make a pattern, is easy to digest,

making us more likely to remember it.

THE MAGIC NUMBER

is knowledge about the power of three is something

that elite athletes use regularly. ey use it when they

talk themselves into high performance. Researchers have

found it makes a massive dierence. When they have run

experiments to see the impact of using motivational self-talk,

like these three-word mantras, they have found people last

much longer on tness tests before they hit exhaustion.

One study found this time to exhaustion increased by 18

per cent, another by almost 40 per cent, indicating that

simply repeating a phrase like 'Push through this' helps

with perseverance. Other studies found the behaviours of

athletes towards the end of time trials, when they were really

fatigued, changed when they used motivational self-talk, and

they were also able to produce signicantly more power.

Why does it work? No-one is 100 per cent sure. Some

W