The idea that athletes should not have sex before a competition – because it could harm their performance – is one of sport’s oldest superstitions, but this myth has just been completely debunked.
According to a new study of hundreds of published articles on the links between sex and sports, there is no plausible research to suggest that athletes should not go on a pre-match binge.
“Abstention from any sexual activity before a sporting competition is a controversial subject in the world of sport,” says lead researcher Laura Stefani from the University of Florence in Italy. “We show no strong scientific evidence that sexual activity has a negative effect on athletic outcomes.”
Despite the lack of evidence to explain why this myth still persists today, there is no doubt that the argument for abstinence goes back a long way.
As early as the 1st century AD, an ancient Greek physician Areaeus of Cappadocia wrote that a man’s strength could be improved by sperm retention, and the idea certainly stuck.
Even before this, the Greek philosopher Plato it is said that he has argued against the Olympians have sex before participating in races.
The same thinking is still relevant in modern times, with World Cup football coaches. uninvite players’ partners to come on tour.
And pop culture maintains the myth, with films like Rockywhere Rocky Balboa’s boxing trainer warns his protégé that “women weaken their legs”.
To see if there was anything in the scientific literature to support these ideas, Stefani’s team sifted through more than 500 published scientific articles examining the links between sports, sex, sports performance and abstinence .
Once they filtered out the research that wasn’t relevant, they were left with only nine studies on the topic – not much to support a notion that has been around for more than 2 millennia.
“We clearly show that this topic has not been sufficiently studied and that only anecdotal stories have been reported,” said Stefani.
Among nine relevant studies published over the past 60 years, the researchers found that no research had systematically addressed the question of whether gender affects athletic performance.
“(T)here is no evidence of methodical investigation into possible differences by gender, intensity or type of sport practiced,” the authors write. “In most of the few manuscripts identified, men are more frequently studied than women.”
In fact, as far as we can draw conclusions from published research, the consensus seems to be that sex before sport is more positive than negative when it comes to performance.
“In general, there is an overall positive impact of sex the day before competition on athletes’ performance,” the authors write. “Especially from a psychological point of view, sex has a relaxing effect, which can help relieve competitive stress in sports of endurance (marathon) or concentration (archery or pistol shooting).”
Still, the researchers caution that the somewhat scattered nature of the studies conducted so far suggests that we can’t really hold any general, reliable truths about the relationship between gender and athletic performance.
All we can really say is that there is no clear evidence to suggest that the former harms the latter, as long as athletes ensure they get a good night’s sleep before competing.
“This review demonstrates that sexual activity in sport is understudied among men and women.” the authors explain. “However, the available data do not really support the misconception that sexual activity can produce a negative effect on athlete performance.”
“Anecdotal experiences, on the contrary, support a positive effect on performance if sexual activity is undertaken at least 10 hours before the sports competition.” they add“and especially if it is not associated with incorrect lifestyle habits such as alcohol abuse, drug abuse and smoking.”
The results are reported in Frontiers of Physiology.
