“Boosting” — the performance-enhancement one gets from injuring oneself

This doesn’t come from the world of baseball. It actually comes from paralympics. And while it is something people in that world have known about and dealt with for some time, it’s news to me:

Elite athletes are often told to work through their pain… it may be more than merely stoic advice. Some athletes with disabilities have discovered injuring themselves enhances their performance. It works so well, it’s against the rules. The International Paralympic Committee has banned the practice. but that hasn’t stopped some athletes to continue to seek out the competitive edge.

Breaking toes, sticking themselves with pins, filling their bladders and any number of other things to give themselves momentary bursts of adrenaline or elevated heart rates. One guy explains via audio embedded on the linked article what it feels like to get electric shocks and how it helps him in rock climbing.

Obviously there are limits to comparisons between paralympic athletes and baseball players in that some of the “boosts” paralympians might give themselves could be specific to dealing with their disabilities. But I am fascinated by the body hack aspects to all of this.

On some level all athletes have done this forever. Rituals they use to pump themselves up, foods they eat, clothes they wear under their uniform and so on could give them mental edges and perhaps physical edges as well. But I bet there are a lot of other things baseball players could do that they haven’t even thought of to help them out in terms of adrenaline and heart rate boosting. I wonder how much of it goes on we don’t know about. And whether, if we did know more about it, people would consider it unfair or call for bans on the practice.

(Thanks to John Measor for the heads up)