Silent Swearing Boosts Endurance in Plank and Wall Sit but Fails to Improve Grip Strength

The research is well established at this point. Say a swear word out loud, and you can hold your hand in ice water longer, squeeze a grip dynamometer harder, and push a bike further. The obvious problem is that most people cannot shout profanity in a public gym.

So researchers tried the quiet version. Forty-two physically active adults repeated a word in their heads, once every five seconds, while working through three exercise tests. For two of the three, the swearing worked.

For the third, it did nothing at all.

Forty-Two Participants, Two Visits, One Word Every Five Seconds

The study was published in February in the International Journal of Exercise Science by Nicholas Washmuth of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Lia Jiannine of Nova Southeastern University, and Christopher Ballmann of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

It used a randomized crossover design. Each participant came in twice, at least 72 hours apart, and completed the same three tests both times: grip strength, then a wall sit to exhaustion, then a plank to exhaustion. On one visit, they silently repeated a swear word. On the other, they silently repeated a neutral word. Everyone did both conditions, so each person acted as their own comparison.

Grip strength showed effectively no difference between conditions. The wall sit and plank times both improved significantly when participants were swearing in their heads.

A Split Between Endurance and Raw Strength

That split is the interesting part. Verbal swearing has improved strength and power in earlier laboratory testing. Silent swearing did not reproduce that here.

The authors’ reading is that the benefit may be task-specific, showing up where you have to keep going rather than where you have to produce force once. Muscular endurance depends heavily on how long someone is willing to tolerate discomfort, which is exactly the kind of thing a psychological intervention might shift.

Why swearing does anything at all is still contested. A mini-review led by Carlie Hay at Samford University, with Ballmann, Washmuth, and Keele University psychologist Richard Stephens among the co-authors, laid out the candidate mechanisms behind the pain effect. The list runs to sympathetic activation, emotion, humor, distraction, aggression, state disinhibition, psychological flow, risky behavior, and self-confidence.

Nobody has established which of those is doing the work, or what the right dose is. It also remains unknown how the intensity of the word, the volume, the frequency, or the timing changes the result.

The field started with a cold pressor experiment in which participants held a hand in ice water while repeating either a swear word or a neutral one. The swearers lasted longer and reported less pain, and the finding was replicated often enough to become a staple of popular science, turning up on MythBusters and in a Netflix series about swearing. A follow-up study found that 73 percent of participants kept their hand in the water longer while swearing, holding on an average of 31 seconds longer.

One experiment tried to isolate what makes a swear word work by inventing two substitutes, fouch and twizpipe, and testing them against a real expletive in the same ice water task. Only the real expletive raised pain threshold and tolerance. The invented words produced nothing, which argues that the taboo quality itself matters in a way novelty does not.

From the Lab to a Knee Replacement Rehab Room

The applied version of this question has already been tested on a patient. A published case report describes a 44-year-old woman going through physical therapy after patellofemoral arthroplasty, a partial knee replacement. Her therapist formally wrote swearing into her plan of care, and she swore out loud during the most challenging and painful interventions.

She reported that repeating the swear word was funny, that it distracted her, and that it made her feel more confident. Both she and her therapist described a strong therapeutic alliance.

Washmuth and Stephens have argued elsewhere that strategic swearing deserves a place in a biopsychosocial approach to care. Most of the population admits to swearing sometimes or often, which makes clinical squeamishness about it look somewhat arbitrary.

What the Evidence Still Cannot Say

None of this establishes that swearing improves clinical outcomes. The crossover study measured performance in healthy, physically active volunteers on three gym tests. It did not measure pain in patients, rehabilitation progress, injury risk, or anything that happens over weeks.

The physical therapy report is a single patient with self-reported outcomes and no comparison condition, which is the weakest form of clinical evidence there is.

There is also an obvious question of who this suits. Swearing carries different social weight in different workplaces, cultures, and clinics, and a strategy that makes one patient laugh will make another uncomfortable. The therapy case worked partly because the patient was already comfortable with it.

What the new study adds is narrow and genuinely practical. If the out-loud version is not an option, the internal version appears to do something for endurance tasks, and appears to do nothing for maximal strength.

Key Questions Answered

What did the study test? Whether repeating a swear word silently, once every five seconds, changes performance on grip strength, a wall sit to exhaustion, and a plank to exhaustion.

What were the results? Wall sit and plank times both improved significantly with silent swearing. Grip strength showed no meaningful difference.

Why would endurance improve but not strength? The authors suggest the benefit is task-specific and may relate to tolerating discomfort for longer rather than producing more force in a single effort.

How does swearing affect pain and performance? The mechanism is unresolved. Proposed explanations include sympathetic arousal, emotion, distraction, humor, aggression, and state disinhibition.

Has this been used with actual patients? One published case report describes a 44-year-old woman who swore during painful exercises after partial knee replacement surgery and reported it helped. That is a single patient, not a trial.

Should people use this in rehabilitation? There is no clinical recommendation supporting it. Anyone in a rehabilitation program should discuss coping strategies with their own therapist.

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