Warning: The following story contains adult language.
Jan. 10, 2025 – It was 2019, and Nick Washmuth, DPT, an associate professor in physical therapy at Samford University, was training for the annual bench press competition among his academic colleagues. As a joke, one of his students sent him a recently published study from the U.K.: “Effect of swearing on strength and power performance,” suggesting that “swearing might help me win,” he remembers.
Out of curiosity, he skimmed the study, assuming it must be some kind of joke. Instead, he found himself intrigued. “It raised more questions than it answered,” Washmuth said.
The study, led by Richard Stephens, PhD, a psychologist at Keele University in Staffordshire, England, inspired Washmuth to test the research methods on himself. “I incorporated swearing into my routine,” he said, swearing out loud for 15 seconds before benching weights. And it helped.
It also prompted him to reach out to Stephens, and the two began collaborating on a series of studies that investigated “when, how, and if someone can swear for reliable positive effects,” Washmuth said.
Over the last several years, they’ve looked at how patients can use “strategic swearing” in physical pain recovery and did a 2023 case study on potty-mouthed physical therapists. Just last month, they published an overview of their (and others’) research into this mostly ignored medical topic, with findings that can often be eyebrow-raising.
Profanity and Performance: Perfect Partners?
As they recorded, swearing every three seconds while doing a Wingate anaerobic power test (a test of muscular power) can increase performance by 4.5%. Swearing for a full 10 seconds before doing a grip strength exercise can increase grip strength by 8%. And swearing every five seconds can increase pushup and plank time by 15% and 12%, respectively. That's some in-depth data, especially for a laboratory test with participants shouting "f--k" every few seconds.
If this sounds like a particularly masculine-leaning type of research, consider where Stephens first got the idea to explore the relationship between cursing and physical health: Watching his wife give birth.
“She was embarrassed by how much she was swearing,” he remembers. “And the midwife tried to reassure her, telling her it was a completely normal part of giving birth. That got me thinking, ‘I wonder if that’s true. If women have always been swearing to alleviate some of the pain of childbirth, there must be some connection.’”
His curiosity led to a 2009 study in which he and other researchers measured how long undergraduate volunteers could keep their hands immersed in freezing cold water while continuously repeating a swear word of their choice, versus a neutral control word like “brown” or “square.” Using swear words “decreased perceived pain,” Stephens wrote in the study, and this allowed the people in the study to keep their hands submerged for an average of 160 seconds, a full minute longer than when they didn’t curse at all.
“Along with the cursing, we also recorded changes in heart rate, which seemed to indicate some sort of ‘fight-or-flight’ response happening,” Stephens said. “So it was a natural progression for us to say, well, if swearing provokes a fight-or-flight response, then it should make you stronger.”
It’s an idea that, at least anecdotally, certainly holds up if you’ve watched any professional sporting events whatsoever. Swearing is so prevalent among athletes that Sports Illustrated posed this hypothetical question in 2022: Does the NBA Have a $@&!*% Problem?”
“Swearing is something that people do when they’re at the top of their game,” said Emma Byrne, author of Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language. “In the U.K., if you watch football, you can quite often tell on the pitch from lip reading that that frustration is voiced through profanity. We know that it happens in airline cockpits. We know it happens in operating theatres. We know that swearing is quite often the way we deal with the stresses of trying to perform at our best.”
But What’s Going on Exactly?
Is it physiological? Psychological? Or something else? Stephens’s own opinion has changed in recent years, when he noticed that some test subjects demonstrated swearing benefits for pain and strength without any changes whatsoever in their heart rates or blood pressure. “That indicates autonomous nervous system activity,” he said. “So the fight-or-flight response is clearly only half of the story.”
One theory: It has something to do with the taboo nature of profanity. The “thrill” of saying a culturally offensive word might be as important as the word itself. But how exactly does one test for a physical boost aided (or impeded) by moral values that can change radically from one person to the next?
“We once did a study where we tried to manipulate the context, but it didn't really show anything,” Stephens said. The thought was, will cursing have the same effect if there’s a little old lady in the room who would seemingly be offended by a group of exercising young men blurting out obscenities?
“We wanted to find out if a little old lady would somehow amplify the strength of the words,” he said. “But obviously, for a student project, we couldn't employ a little old lady.” So they used a large photograph of an elderly woman instead, which (unsurprisingly) had no effect on anyone’s willingness to curse openly.
There’s also the question of whether certain curse words carry more power than others. And then you’re not just looking into personal feelings about language, but cultural context as well.
“If someone identifies as a Christian, they may rate ‘God d--n’ as more taboo than the word ‘f--k,’ while another individual may rate ‘f--k’ as more intense,” said Washmuth. “Someone living in the United States may rate the C word as more taboo than ‘f--k,’” while someone in the United Kingdom may consider the C word more casual.
“There are biopsychosocial and contextual factors that help determine a swear word’s effectiveness,” he said.
Swearing May Unlock Something Inside Us
Washmuth and Stephens are one of the few (if not only) research teams taking swearing seriously as a medical topic. “We’re currently investigating the effects of different-strength swear words on pain tolerance and threshold,” said Washmuth. “The conventional strong swear word ‘f--k’ and soft swear word ‘d--n’ are being used, with a neutral word serving as a control. Our hypothesis is that improvements in pain tolerance and threshold would be greater for ‘f—k.’ This study is currently in progress.”
Their most recent study, published online in December, looked at yet another factor in the psychological pathway that could possibly explain swearing’s benefits: disinhibition. “It appears that swearing puts us in a more disinhibited state of mind, so we don't hold back and we go for it a little bit more,” said Stephens. “It's almost unlocking potential within us.”
To test this theory, they used an electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure the electrical activity of the brain, looking for a neural signal of disinhibition during swearing.
“Previous research has found that after consuming alcohol, which makes you disinhibited, people show a smaller error-related negativity signal,” he said. “But we found no evidence of that during swearing. So the jury’s still out about what’s going on.”
A Deeper Neurological, and Profanity-Laced, Mystery
Byrne recalls talking to a radio producer about his father, who had suffered a stroke and lost all of his language.
“They’d go on family picnics and he wouldn’t say a word,” Byrne said. “Then all of a sudden, a bird swoops down and tries to steal his sandwich, and he shouts, ‘You f--ker!’ His mom hadn’t heard his voice in years, and suddenly there he is, cursing out a bird.”
This can happen with stroke patients, who despite sustaining damage in the left hemisphere of their brains, the part largely responsible for language processing, “are still able to swear fluently,” Byrne said.
So-called automatic speech, like saying hi and goodbye and thank you – that requires little to no thought – can be retained in some patients post-stroke. But why profanity? Especially harsh, emotional profanity?
More needs to be investigated, Byrne said. Swearing is spontaneous expressive language, and when a stroke patient is able to use spontaneous expressive language, even if it’s filthy, that signifies something. Is it the brain trying to repair itself? Is it relearning how to express emotions in the only way the brain will allow it?
“We see a lot more activity happening in the brain during cursing than we do with just normal speech or non-cursing speech,” said Byrne. “There’s so much there that needs more research.”
The Future Potential of the F Word
There’s a bigger question here, Byrne said. What, exactly, is the medical field going to do with all this information?
Are we heading toward a future where doctors prescribe a daily dose of screaming obscenities along with painkillers? Will physical therapists coach patients to quicker recovery via well-timed profanity? Will personal trainers push their clients to be increasingly foul-mouthed to become their best physical selves?
For Byrne, that scenario isn’t that far off. “I'd like to see the research start to chip away at the idea that swearing and offensiveness are intertwined,” she said. “Some cursing is meant to express excitement and enjoyment and emotions. It’s not always designed to be hurtful.”
For Washmuth, he’d like to continue exploring the benefits of swearing outside of the lab, especially in his area of physical therapy. “We need naturalistic, real-world studies to help guide its utility,” he said. “There are potential positive effects if the patient swears and if the physical therapist swears. My research agenda is currently trying to determine how to find the right patient, swear at the right time, and swear for the right reason.”
But despite his enthusiasm, he doesn’t expect swearing to take the medical world by storm anytime soon. “Before swearing can be effectively prescribed, we need a better understanding of the mechanisms behind it,” Washmuth said. “We need to understand the contextual factors that matter and the degree to which they matter, and we need a better understanding of the biopsychosocial factors that may play a role in the beneficial effects of swearing.”
In the meantime, Washmuth continues to use swearing in his own strength training, duplicating some of what he’s witnessed firsthand in the lab. Now 44 years old, he said he’s just set a personal record, bench-pressing 290 pounds.
“And yes, I swore for 15 seconds before making the lift,” he said. “The evidence is compelling. We should trust the evidence.”
