I am in the process of reading an article titled "A Taxonomy of Polygraph Counter and Counter-Countermeasures" published in a professional journal.

I will be posting more information about this article when I am 
done reading it in its entirety.  If anyone has read the article already, feel free to critique it for us, as I plan on doing in the near future.

But before I get into the full content of the article,  I would like to start a discussion on something I ran across in the first couple pages of the article that really caught my attention.

The writer of the article made a comment about what he called a "creative" countermeasure that some have tried to use when facing a polygraph test:   

***Working out prior to a test to the point of exhaustion, with a combination of intense weightlifting and aerobic work.

The writer of the article mentions that people try and do this prior to a polygraph test in an effort to "kill their nerves," in a sense, so that when they go in for the polygraph test, they are not as edgy and likely to react so strongly to the questions asked during the test.

I am trying to determine if working your body out to exhaustion would have any effect on polygraph results at all?

Here are my insights and thoughts about this topic:

I am an avid weightlifter.  I lift weights quite a bit, and sometimes put in up to 2 1/2 hours of intense weighlifting.
When I do put in my best effort into a workout (meaning lifting like a crazy mother fu$#@%), I come home and, after cleaning up, feel like my body is totally numb and relaxed.
I don't feel edgy at all, and it feels like my nerves have been "killed," so to speak.  Nothing really seems to get me worked up after a workout like that, and I assume this is because my energy has been spent to the extreme.   
Ultimately, workouts are a way to relieve stress.

Would it possible that a gut-wrenching workout (and I am talking taking it to the maximum effort) done soon before a polygraph test benefit someone facing a polygraph test?

While one would not need to go through with the effort of a gut-wrenching workout for a control questions (probable-lie) test, simply because other countermeasure can help you pass when used properly during the test (i.e. biting ones tongue),
might it be possible that a gut-wrenching workout may help someone out facing an Irrelevant/Relevant polygraph format?

The reason I say this is because a Global type test (that doesn't use control questions) is scored in a ranking type manner, and so they see if any questions had a heightened reaction in comparison to the norm of reactions.

If one was to go through a Ball-Busting workout prior to the test, leaving their body nearly numb from exhaustion, might this aid someone taking an Irrelevant/Relevant type of polygraph test? I am wondering because maybe the persons body will be so worn out that they will not really react to anything with much significance, and so when a rank of reactions is done, there won't be any areas where the person 
reacted to unproportionately.  Also, would a workout prior to a Global type test possibly aid a person in passing if they also kept carefull monitoring of their breathing, making sure they keep a uniform pace the whole way through?

Any ideas or reactions to this topic?  Is working out hard before a poly a waste of time? Might it help in an Irrelevant/Relevant formatted test?   

Netnin

Netin,

Here is a study you may be interested in.  This site is also searchable for further studies.

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