A Study Reveals the Place Where Time Moves 9% Slower for Humans

There’s a mysterious dilation happening in this location.

• A new study shows that cyclists felt time pass 8-9 percent less quickly during exercise.
• Before and after exercise, there was no distortion. The participants also set their own pace.
• Timing and pacing are key for competitive athletes in racing sports like swimming and cycling.

Finally, science has confirmed that time does slow way down when you’re inside the gym. But it’s not the boredom or the person on the next elliptical who won’t stop talking on the phone. In a small study, participants completed stationary bicycle trials and then measured 30 seconds to the best of their ability. The results show that participants were about 8-9 percent faster than the real-time, indicating that the clock would have appeared to move slowly to them.

And besides the joke about time slowing down, this effect raises a lot of interesting research questions about what’s going on. This study focuses on people’s perceptions and psychological explanations, but the human body goes through a multitude of physical changes during exercise. If athletes want to improve pacing, they may need to work on a handful or more of variables.

In the study, 33 participants completed a stationary bicycle course of 4000 meters. They were asked to estimate 30-second intervals at five points: before the course, after 500 meters, after 1500 meters, after 2500 meters, and then post-exercise. There were three runs through the course. One was solo, like setting a time trial in Mario Kart. The second had an opponent, like the ghost you can race in those time trials. And the third was an active race, where participants were asked to try to beat the opponent. Each bicyclist was asked to rate their perceived exertion, but they weren’t asked to hit specific speeds, except in the one trial with a competitive opponent.

The details of the results may be surprising: “There was no difference between exercise conditions or time points (500 m, 1500 m, and 2500 m).” That means the appearance of a competitor, and any extra effort toward beating them, didn’t change the participant’s perception of time; nor did the steady increase of perceived effort during the entire trial.

The study is small with just 33 participants, but the research team says a number of their method details and findings are novel, meaning without precedent in the existing research. Indeed, exercise science and athlete conditioning have both made huge leaps in sophistication in the last 20 or 30 years, creating opportunities to study and optimize entire new areas. These findings will lead to further study.

This peer-reviewed paper appears in the journal Brain and Behavior. The four researchers, from both Netherlands and England, focus on sports psychology in their discussion. After all, they hint, if having an active race against a close competitor doesn’t help time feel like it’s passing less slowly, athletes need something else to engage their attention in order to stay in the active zone and out of the boredom zone.

Accurately pacing their progress is also key for competitive athletes, the researchers say. Elites like Michael Phelps often rely on visualization to help them rehearse their races to a point of rote muscle memory, and correct timing is key to this as well. In Phelps’ career-defining races, an awkwardly timed flip turn could mean missing the world record.

“[M]ore work has to be done to further unravel the role of external stimuli, exercise intensity, and duration on the perception of time during exercise,” the researchers conclude. “All of these factors affect timing, pacing, and the successful completion of optimal outcomes across physical activities.”

They suggest that newer techniques, like timed lighting, may help support athletes’ goals in pacing and output. Indeed, almost anyone who’s competed in a race sport has turned a corner or flipped a turn and realized they spent too much energy to bring it home. Timing is a biological and psychological challenge in the body, but learning and adjusting it is still up to the individual athlete and their coach.

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