Does hard acceleration actually help some cars?

I consider myself a fairly casual driver; I accelerate slowly, don’t go terribly fast and rarely push my car over 3k rpm.
I’ve noticed, on the rare occasion I have to floor my ZX2, that for a while afterwards she seems to run a little bit better. I’ve noticed lower RPMs, the minor idling rough issue disappears for a bit, and I just __feel__ like I’m getting better performance out of the car. What would cause this? Should I do it more often? Or is there some bigger underlying problem I should look into?