I'm curious what's stopping the human body from giving a hundred percent what it feels like is that it's your body stopping your body right like you when you when you push to your max it feels like you go to the point where either your legs or your heart or your lungs won't let you go any further.

But what the research seems to suggest is that in the vast majority of cases, it's actually

your brain holding you back, preventing you from hitting those limits for your own good in ways

that we're not entirely sure how it works, but we're pretty sure that the limits that

feel physical are almost always actually mediated by the brain. Hi, I'm Cody Gohueff with the brain power to curiosity.

Hi, I'm Cody Goff with with the brainpower to curiosity.

I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today, we're going to talk about the limits of the human body.

Every week we explore what we don't know because curiosity makes you smarter.

This is the Curiosity Podcast.

What if we all can go farther, push harder, and achieve more than we think we're capable of?

Alex Hutchinson is the author of the new book Endure, mind, body, and the curiously

elastic limits of human performance.

And he has some answers.

He's an award-winning journalist who wrote that endurance is quote the struggle to

continue against a mounting desire to stop and he says that we're always capable

of pushing a little farther today we'll learn how the book is calledure but let's talk about what's the definition of

endurance in this context. What are you actually talking about and trying to get at in

this book? Yeah that was a question that I had to wrestle with kind of I probably should have wrestled at the beginning of writing the book but it sort of I kept wrestling with it as I went through the book and my definition kept getting broader and broader sort of from the sort of start of thinking, well, endurance is how fast can I run to

realizing that it's much broader in athletic pursuits, to realizing the similarities

between like running a marathon and studying for an exam,

they're not just metaphorical that actually when you get into it.

...