“Priming exercise” and psychological priming share a label, not necessarily a mechanism. Deliberate preparation for a known future competition provides no obvious need for unconscious goal activation, and the article presents no evidence that such activation actually occurs. The shared terminology leaves the proposed explanation primed for equivocation.
Holmberg and Kelly (2026) provide a useful critique of physiological explanations for “priming exercise,” but their attempt to connect this literature to psychological priming introduces a much less plausible mechanism. The connection appears to arise largely because the two literatures happen to use the same word. That shared terminology leaves the argument primed for equivocation.
In sports physiology, “priming exercise” refers to a deliberately performed bout of exercise intended to improve performance later that day. In cognitive and social psychology, priming refers to prior exposure to a stimulus that subsequently alters processing or behavior, sometimes without awareness or conscious intention. These are fundamentally different uses of the term. The fact that both involve something occurring before something else does not imply that they share a psychological mechanism.
This distinction becomes especially important when the authors invoke nonconscious goal priming. They suggest that exercise might activate performance goals and related behavioral representations that persist until later testing. They cite classic social-psychological priming research, including Bargh and colleagues, to support the possibility that goals can be activated without awareness and subsequently influence behavior.
But the proposed mechanism is poorly matched to the phenomenon being explained. An athlete does not ordinarily encounter a “priming exercise” incidentally. The athlete performs it because a competition or performance test is coming later. The later performance goal is therefore likely to have been activated before the exercise begins:
competition later → intention to prepare → priming exercise.
The goal is not plausibly dormant until the exercise somehow activates it unconsciously. Indeed, the goal is probably one of the reasons the athlete performs the exercise in the first place. During the exercise the athlete may also consciously think about the competition, technique, pacing, readiness, or expected benefits. Under those circumstances, invoking nonconscious goal activation is not merely unnecessary; the proposed causal sequence is almost backwards.
The authors’ own examples illustrate the problem. They discuss athletes rehearsing particular pacing strategies, using metronomes, receiving verbal cues, believing that squatting will improve subsequent jumping, and developing confidence or expectations about later performance. These are readily understood as deliberate preparation, task practice, expectancy, motivation, or attentional effects. None requires a nonconscious priming mechanism.
The scientific evidence offered for the nonconscious account is also weak. The article provides no exercise experiment demonstrating that a priming-exercise bout activates a previously inactive goal outside awareness and that this activation subsequently causes improved performance hours later. In fact, the authors repeatedly acknowledge that these possibilities “may” occur, are “hypothesized,” or “have yet to be directly examined.” Thus, the proposed mechanism is not an empirical finding from the exercise literature.
Instead, support is imported from a different literature on behavioral and goal priming. That literature is itself scientifically controversial, and citing classic demonstrations does not establish that the same mechanism operates in an entirely different situation involving intentional athletic preparation. The conceptual inference appears to be:
psychology calls something “priming”
- exercise science calls something “priming”
→ psychological priming may explain exercise priming.
But identical terminology is not evidence of mechanistic equivalence.
The distinction matters because the paper already identifies much more plausible explanations. Task-specific practice, motor learning, expectancy, researcher effects, motivation, and explicit performance preparation could all produce later performance changes. These mechanisms fit the actual structure of the situation: athletes know that performance is coming and intentionally prepare for it. The nonconscious goal-priming hypothesis adds an unnecessary and poorly supported causal layer.
The problem can therefore be summarized simply: an implausible mechanism is invoked to explain effects that have not been shown to require that mechanism, and the empirical justification comes largely from a separate literature that happens to use the same word.