Anger and power

When I was lifting weights seriously, I always had my best days when I could tap into my anger. Most of my weightlifting friends were the same way. We generally agreed that when we could control our anger and funnel it into the lifting, we could move a lot more weight. None of us, though, would even try to quantify the effect, and a vocal minority, including my training partner at the time and old friend, Randy, felt that they did their best work when they were serene and centered.

A recent Sports Science episode, which an MMA site describes here, tried to gauge just how much power anger could yield. Their subject was the MMA fighter (and DJ), Houston Alexander.

First, they had a calm Alexander, his heart rate normal, hit a crash test dummy and measured the impact: 600 pounds of force. That, for those who don't follow such things, is in technical terms a shitload of force.

Then, Alexander's trainer took the fighter aside and talked to him, urged him to recall some bad things, including how he felt after a recent defeat, and helped him get furious.

Alexander hit the dummy again, but this time, he hit it much harder: 1,000 pounds of force. Alexander's heart rate was at 150 beats per minute, and adrenaline was coursing through his system.

Think about this: Just getting mad increased his power by two-thirds. Okay, this isn't great science, because it ignores warm-up effects, involves only one subject, and so on, but the point is clear: anger can amp you.

They did a final experiment in which they gave Alexander two shots of epinephrine (basically, synthetic adrenaline) and boosted his heart rate to 156 bpm. (Do not do this at home, boys and girls.) He hit the dummy again: 900 pounds of force.

Anger beat chemistry, at this time around

Though I have to say my money would be on chemistry if the people involved were willing to do a lot of damage to the subject, the demonstrable power of anger is impressive indeed.