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The ability to endure physical performance over extended periods of time is an important ability in daily life, and most prototypically required during athletic activities. Endurance performance has commonly been studied from a purely physiological point of view, assuming that people terminate an endurance activity because they have exhausted their physiological capacity. However, research shows that people often disengage from a straining activity even when their physiological resources would allow them to continue.

To date, most physiological research does not account for this observation and remains silent on possible psychological factors that might explain when and why people decide to disengage. The symposium addressed this issue by bringing together researchers from psychology, neuroscience and exercise physiology to discuss which factors limit endurance performance. The goal was to create an opportunity to integrate state-of-the-art knowledge across disciplines, thus advancing our understanding of the psychological determinants of endurance performance and inspiring future research.

All speakers provided unique perspectives on endurance performance and greatly contributed to the overall success of the symposium:

• Samuele Marcora opened the symposium by introducing his psychobiological model of endurance performance.
• Chris Englert and Wanja Wolff provided an overview on the current state of self-control research in sports.
• Louis-Solal Giboin presented first results of an experiment that approached endurance performance from a psychoneurophysiological point of view.
• Rémi Radel introduced a dual model perspective on the neurocognitive functions involved in the regulation of effort during endurance performance.
• Anja Achtziger provided an introduction to the self-regulation strategy of if-then planning and presented evidence for the capacity of this self-regulation strategy to automatize earliest phases of information processing.
• Raphael Bertschinger presented evidence on the effectiveness of a mathematical approach to develop optimal pacing strategies for cycling time trials.
• Maik Bieleke presented potentials and pitfalls of if-then plans in affecting ratings of perceived exertion during static endurance performance and its cerebral correlates.

We are grateful for these diverse and insightful contributions, which have underlined how complex the factors are that determine endurance performance. We are already looking forward to having an opportunity of repeating this symposium next year.

At the chair of sport psychology, we are interested in the psychoneurophysiological correlates of self-controlled sports performance. Specifically, we are interested in how self-regulation strategies can be used to improve endurance performance. (click here to learn more).