Some athletes are known for shouting on tennis courts or in stadiums, sometimes bordering on ridicule. However, shouting has a beneficial effect according to some scientists…
Does screaming improve athletic performance? Indeed, we hear many athletes scream, whether in tennis, weightlifting or even in athletics. Some are even known for emitting particularly powerful sounds, like Rafael Nadal or Maria Sharapova, without it being known exactly whether these screams were beneficial for athletic performance.
This is what the apprentice researchers of the Big lab. This Canadian show aims to test shared hypotheses in society with the help of 100 guinea pigs. They therefore created two groups to empirically observe the differences in performance by asking each of them to hammer in nails while shouting or without shouting. It emerges from this real-life experiment that the group hammering in the nail while shouting performed better than the one that did it silently.
More broadly, shouting allows for better management of breathing. By expelling air abruptly, the athlete avoids the accumulation of CO2 in the lungs, thus optimizing oxygenation. This process is particularly visible in weightlifters who shout when lifting heavy weights. This shout releases internal tension and ensures more fluid breathing during exercise.
Similarly, in tennis, shouting on serve increases the speed of the ball by up to 5%. In fact, the shout and the air expelled at this moment allow athletes to contract the abdominal muscles more powerfully and therefore generate more force. This technique is also particularly used in discus, hammer or javelin throwing events in athletics, where a simultaneous contraction of all the muscles is required to throw as far as possible.
After managing breathing and contracting muscles, shouting can have a third decisive effect: a simple psychological effect. Shouting allows you to release mental pressure when hitting, to self-motivate yourself or even to disturb your opponents. More surprisingly, shouting when hitting a tennis ball also has the effect of masking the noise of the racket from your opponent and thus giving a little less information on the effect and power of the shot. Every detail counts.