Can telling yourself during exercise that youre not as tired as you think you are help you work out longer and achieve more benefit from your exercise? Researchers from the University of Kent in Canterbury, England published results in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport and Exercise showing that verbally encouraging yourself during a draining workout can affect your minds calculations and stave off fatigue.
The researchers recruited 24 healthy, physically active young men and women to participate in the study. To obtain baseline results, over several weeks the participants were asked to pedal a computerized stationary bicycle at about 80 percent of their predetermined maximum force until they felt that they could pedal no more and quit. The mean time to exhaustion was 637 seconds with a standard deviation s = 265 seconds.
The participants were then coached in motivational "self-talk," the kind of verbal banter that many athletes engage in during workouts, whether done aloud or silently. The volunteers systematically learned how best to talk to themselves in an encouraging way, using phrases such as "youre doing well" and "feeling good" that psychologists have found to be motivating.
Then the participants again rode the computerized bicycle to exhaustion, but this time they used motivational "self-talk", some aloud, some silently. The mean time to exhaustion was = 750 seconds with no significant change in the standard deviation of s = 265 seconds.
Is this evidence that motivational "self-talk" increases the mean time μ to exhaustion? Investigate this question by answering the following questions about the hypothesis test
H0: μ = 637 seconds
HA: μ > 637 seconds
where μ is the mean time to exhaustion when motivating "self-talk" is used. Recall that n = 24.
Question 1. What is the value of the test statistic t ? (use 2 decimal places in your answer)?