- Brainiacs and bodybuilders alike should give a crap about their performance.
Whether they cultivate their muscles or minds, people have always sought to be faster, stronger, better. To achieve the peak of excellence, athletes and great thinkers both have resorted to various performance boosters, from anabolic steroids to gladiator sweat.
However, you don’t need to take anything to do better, whether it’s in sports or academia. In fact, you should expel something.
That’s right — the key to enhanced brain and muscle power is pooping.
According to a new study, emptying your large intestine has a shockingly large effect on how well you can perform. Tests have revealed that not only does pooping help you get more out of your muscles, but it also sharpens your mind.
The researchers aren’t exactly clear on why this effect happens, but it’s most likely due to your body allocating limited resources to where they’re most needed. In any case, the revelation could offer new insight into both athletic training and the treatment of degenerative brain diseases.
You know, this result shouldn’t really surprise anybody. After all, don’t we all feel much lighter in body and mind after a nice, big dump?
Three Stages of Defecation
The poop research was published recently in the journal Sports Medicine and Health Science. It has long been known that having healthy bowel movements significantly benefits your health (and also the health of the planet if you’re a whale).
Being constipated, for instance, has been shown to reduce cognitive function — in other words, a plugged butt makes you forgetful and slows your thinking. Clearly, there’s some kind of connection between your brain and your booty.
Could the opposite be true as well, then? If not being able to poop makes you dull and sluggish, does a healthy bowel movement make you smarter and faster?
To find out, the research team — led by biochemist Chen-Chan Wei of the University of Taipei — hired 13 triathletes for their tests. They chose these athletes specifically because a triathlon requires the participants to compete in three completely different sports, which is an immense physical and mental challenge.
In the first part of the test, the scientists measured the triathletes’ physical performance three times. Initially, they checked how the athletes did without having pooped recently.
For the second test, they waited for the athletes to have a normal bowel movement before doing the performance test.
Finally, the researchers gave the athletes a laxative and measured their performance after they had completely flushed their plumbing, so to speak.
Pooping Makes You Better — Period
The results were pretty astonishing. More than two-thirds of the athletes experienced a measurable uptick in their physical results after a normal poop.
After the laxative, they all did better.
Alright, so pooping obviously improved physical performance. But what about the brain part?
For this test, the triathletes underwent the same “no poop, regular poop, laxative” regimen as before. Instead of a physical test, though, they had to do the Stroop test.
The Stroop test feeds the participants conflicting visual information and asks them to pick the correct answer. You know this one — it’s the one where you might be asked to choose the word “red” but the word is colored green.
In the end, the triathletes pretty much repeated the results from the physical test. Nine of them did much better after just a regular poop, and all of them were more mentally sharp after the laxative treatment.
The Brain-Butt Connection
So, what does all this mean in the end? According to the researchers, it reveals a couple of things about our brains and guts.
First of all, it demonstrates that doing well in sports or physical labor isn’t just about your brawn. It’s got just as much to do with your brain.
“When you do exercise, especially long-distance exercise, your brain is going to be sending high amounts of commands to the muscles. Whether or not you can sustain muscle contraction is not really depending on whether your muscle has wrung out the energy, it’s whether your brain is able to challenge your muscle,” Chia-Hua Kuo of the University of Taipei explained to ScienceAlert.
Perhaps more importantly, it shows that your bowels’ current condition may directly affect your brain’s (and therefore your muscles’) performance. Why that happens isn’t completely clear, but the researchers believe it’s a fairly simple matter of resource allocation.
Digesting food and moving the resulting poop through your digestive tract requires a lot of work. Not only that but keeping your butthole shut when not pooping can also be quite an arduous task.
Should you empty your bowels before a physical or mental task, your body can now send all the effort that would’ve gone into your guts elsewhere. All of a sudden, you just might find yourself doing better at whatever you try.
The results may help athletes in their training, and it could also advance the treatment of conditions like Parkinson’s. However, the team warns that you shouldn’t take laxatives before a competition or college exam — but you just might want to go poop normally.
“Our spirit is not only inside the skull, but also in other parts. And the rectum is also part of the brain,” mused Kuo.