Mind-Body Effects of Mindfulness-Based Training in Athletes: A Preliminary Randomized Controlled Trial (Campo et al., 2026)
Athletes spend hours training the body but rarely train how they pay attention to it. Mindfulness may sharpen awareness of internal signals such as heartbeat, breathing and fatigue, and may nudge the autonomic nervous system, which governs stress and recovery, toward better balance. Evidence from sport is still thin, so a team led by Carmelo Campo and David Conversi at Sapienza University of Rome ran a preliminary randomized trial, reported in Frontiers in Psychology.
The study included 46 amateur athletes aged 18 to 59, most of them CrossFit participants from a sports centre near Rome, none with prior meditation experience. They were randomly assigned to eight weeks of mindfulness training or to a wait-list that carried on training as usual. The program was 16 sessions of an hour, led by a certified instructor, moving from focusing attention on the breath to open monitoring of whatever arose, with recorded meditations for home practice. In total, participants practiced for roughly nine hours. Before and after, the researchers measured interoceptive awareness with a questionnaire, heart rate variability (the natural variation in time between heartbeats) with a chest strap, cognitive inhibition with the Stroop colour-word task, lung function with spirometry, and flexibility with a sit-and-reach test.
Afterwards, the mindfulness group reported better interoceptive awareness, while the wait-list group did not change. The mindfulness group also showed higher SDNN, a measure of overall heart rate variability often read as a sign of flexible autonomic function, which rose by about 18 milliseconds against no meaningful change in controls. Importantly, the other measures did not differ between groups: a second heart rate variability index tied to parasympathetic activity, Stroop performance, lung function and flexibility. The authors suggest that better body awareness and autonomic balance could help athletes judge fatigue and recover, but the study did not test that link or measure sporting performance.
The trial was small, drew mainly on one sport and lasted only eight weeks. Its sensitivity analysis showed it could only detect medium-to-large effects, so smaller benefits may have been missed. Participants knew which group they were in, the article reports no trial registration, the program blended two techniques rather than following a standard protocol, and interoceptive awareness was analysed as a single composite score.
The findings are best read as a hint, not a verdict: brief mindfulness training may change how athletes sense and regulate their bodies even when fitness measures do not move. Larger, longer and preregistered trials, ideally including performance and injury outcomes, will be needed to find out whether it matters on the field.
Reference and link: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1755043
