Endurance Neuroscientist: The Shocking Link Between the Brain & Performance

Mental fatigue is real, but can you actually train your brain like a muscle to race harder, longer, or smarter? We're joined by Dr. Scott Frey from Cerebral Performance to unpack the neuroscience behind brain endurance training, cognitive fatigue, and mental toughness. And we want to ask, what's the science of brain training and what does this mean for everyday endurance athletes? Scott, a very big welcome to the podcast. Can you tell us what cerebral performance is all about and what inspired you to combine neuroscience with endurance sport?

Yeah, I'd love to. Thank you for having me. So for 30 years, I was a research professor in an area called cognitive neuroscience. I actually got my PhD in experimental psychology long ago. And then all of a sudden we had this evolution in the 90s of tools that allowed us to look at the human brain when it was functioning. And so I went back and respecialized after the PhD learning tool, do some of these exciting new brain imaging technologies. And my interest has always been in the role of the brain in human performance. And so for 30 years, that played out as a career academic and researcher doing a lot of research in the laboratory. And then I had this parallel life where I was very passionately involved in various endurance sports over the years, including triathlon in the 90s before my kids and I decided that it was time for a change. After 30 years of doing a research career, I wanted to start to apply some of the exciting things that I was seeing in the journals coming through my lab and other labs to actual endurance performance out in the real world. And so cerebral performance is the kind of culmination of that. It's my business that I started to really try and make that connection between brain science and human performance with real athletes out there training and racing.

I guess that's the first point we wanted to start with, is that the science is quite strong on understanding how much the brain impacts performance, and specifically brain fatigue is your specialty from all your research, and then now trying to apply that to real world athletes. That's where the jump could be quite difficult. And we go, okay, here's all the theory, but does it actually apply? How's your experience been in the application?

Yeah, like all things that move from the lab to real world, there are a lot of challenges. Right. Because when we're doing science in the lab, we have so much control over the problem space. But out in the real world, things don't go as planned often. And so what we're. What I'm finding is that we could take the ideas that are coming out of the science, but then We've always got to temper the implementation of those ideas with practical reality. And I'll give you an example of this in the brain fatigue central fatigue space. A lot of the studies that there have been over 70 of them now that have shown that if you give an athlete very demanding fatiguing cognitive tasks for a certain amount of time, let's say half an hour, it actually doesn't just affect their cognitive performance, but it affects their physical performance. Well, you know, that's a, that's a well established finding. How those studies actually played out was to use very, a limited number of fatiguing tasks. And in the real world, we would never be able to get athletes to, you know, bang away on, on a, on the same old task for 30 minutes a day. And so the next iteration of that work, what that work has inspired is this idea that we can actually train fatigue resistance in these systems. And of course, the lab studies leaned very heavily on pretty boring tasks that would be done for large amounts of time. And so I couldn't really just take that and literally implement it with my athletes. They would never comply. They get bored and I don't blame them. But I can take the idea and I can then think about how can we build in variety, how can we make this like you would a normal training, physical loading training plan with, with intervals and sessions that are maybe building more and accumulated fatigue and endurance and so forth. And so there's always this challenge and I think that's the fun part, the creative part. How can we take scientific ideas and translate them? And I'm sure you have similar experiences in your world as a coach.

It's interesting. The body we know physically adapts to, to almost every environment over time. And, and so what you're trying to do is train your brain to adapt to fatigue resistance. So, so how do you go about that?

Yeah, well, if we're, if the starting spot is that when the brain is fatigued, so we all know the feeling you come home from a hard day of whatever kind of challenging work you might have, and assuming it's been cognitively demanding work, it's hard to head out the door for a training session a lot of the time. Well, why is that? Maybe you've been sitting at a desk all day. Right. Well, the reason for that is that when we are loading the brain and making lots of decisions and focusing our attention for long periods of time, like any other or system in the body, it accumulates fatigue and needs recovery and rest. And so I was mentioning to you earlier that we can demonstrate those effects in the lab by artificially inducing fatigue in people. And we can also reverse that. Right. We can give people a substance that acts just on the brain like caffeine, and we can show that, huh. We can reduce that central fatigue a little bit and we can get people to be a little more motivated to perform. Right. We, we regularly. Most endurance athletes use caffeine in this way. There's been a lot of demonstrations of this. And as someone coming at this from the brain science perspective, with a strong interest in strainability of the brain, you know, one of the most amazing discoveries that we've had in brain science in the last 50 years is that we can train the brain throughout the lifespan and performance will improve on whatever we're training it to do. And I think this is what you were referring to, Gerard, a minute ago. It's just like other systems in the body, like neuromuscular systems and so on. But what's really cool about the brain is that it has this capacity to reconfigure itself. We call it neuroplasticity. We spend a lot of time in the lab. How can we harness this neuroplasticity in ways that would improve performance? If you think about this problem of central fatigue, why couldn't we harness that neuroplasticity to build greater resistance to that kind of central fatigue? And how would we go about that? So that's the starting point.

Yeah, I really want to explore this topic of central fatigue, and I think it'll set up the whole context of the rest of the episode. Because from our perspective as coaches, we are always saying to athletes, especially in endurance sports, half Ironman, Ironman, you should finish the day as mentally fatigued, as physical, because of the amount of decisions you should be making to stay focused on your execution, performance. And with all the new data, power, heart rate, speed, cadence, everything that you need to be focusing on to make the right decisions to get the best out of yourself. That takes a lot of, from your brain. So from that perspective, we can see how your, how your brain gets tired. But what else is the problem here? What's wrong with your brain or central nervous system getting fatigued? How does that impact the physical performance?

Yeah, so there have been really nice studies using some of those technologies I was mentioning earlier, demonstrating that we have this distributed system of areas. They're distributed throughout the brain, but they're intimately connected and communicate with one another. We refer to it as the fatigue network. And it seems to, to modulate its activity depending on our State of restedness or our state of fatigue. And what's really interesting about that fatigue network is it the areas that are involved in it overlap highly with the areas in the brain that are important for computing our sense of perceived exertion. So a lot of athletes are familiar with RPE or rate of perceived exertion. And, you know, undoubtedly as coaches, that's something that you work with as part of all of the other data that you're working with your athletes to get. Well, perceived exertion is a very complex perception that our brain assembles through a bunch of different bits of information coming back from the body about how hard we're working. But also it's doing this kind of calculation of perceived exertion based on anticipation of the future. And so when we start to get fatigued, the fatigue network starts to change its functioning, and it impacts the functioning areas involved in computing perceived exertion. And what we see is that in particular, people begin to overestimate the anticipated costs of continuing in the activity. And simultaneously, they start to devalue the rewards that they expect to come from engaging that activity. So to put that in kind of more simple terms, when you have a lot of central fatigue, your prediction of how difficult the ride you're on or the run you're on is going to be into the future goes up. You overestimate the cost, and you start to devalue the rewards that you'll reap for continuing in that activity. And when that happens, motivation goes down.

It's an incredible protective function the brain has, isn't it? It's actually really trying to stop you from pushing yourself too far. And there's an amazing amount of examples around the world of athletes as you've seen. I remember. I can't remember which year it was. Was it Joan Benoit coming in for the marathon? No, it wasn't her. No, it was the year she won. I think one of the athletes came into the stadium having lost all physical control. Yes, but her brain was so attuned to finishing that event that, you know, it was almost impossible to watch her do that last 400 meters on the track of her marathon because she was totally lost control. But her brain was so strong that she was able to get to the finish. And it was one of those physical achievements that it's been ingrained in my brain that, you know, you can push yourself further than you think. And. And that's an area where, you know, to train yourself to. To really push your physical limits. It takes some training, doesn't it?

Absolutely. And we. I remember, I can see the images in my head of exactly what you're describing on the track. And I think you're right. I think it was the 84 Olympics in LA coming into the stadium on a very hot day. We remember these instances because they happen so rarely. They're not everyday occurrences or every race occurrences, you know, they're, they're their famous standout episodes. Because normally the brain is doing such a good job of keeping us from getting anywhere near those physical limits of physical capacity. I like to make a distinction that I think captures this really well between our physical capacity, like the true upper limits, where if you went beyond that, you'd be on the floor, and our functional capacity, which is a very movable ceiling. It can be affected by all sorts of things. Right. And as a coach, you're trying to think about how do you move that physical, that functional capacity ceiling a little bit higher, a little bit closer to the athlete's true physical capacity? What levers can you pull?

How do you get to manipulate your thought process to resist that brain fatigue that's gonna limit you? Because you're predicting, the brain is predicting that if you continue with this rate of intensity, you are going to have a failure down the track. So the brain is trying to prevent you from that failure. So how, how, you know, self talk is something that people do a lot to, you know, to push through barriers. But, but it, it is a real feeling that your, your brain is, is really in a protective mode and it's trying to stop you from. And what I'm trying to say is you are thinking like, I can't sustain this. So, so my brain is going to go into protective mode, so it's going to slow me down. And my motivation, because the end result's not going to be what I want. And then all of a sudden I'm almost wanting to opt out of the event. How, how can we, how can we kind of trick our brain into, into not thinking that way and to say, no, we can. We've got the physical training in us. It's just mentally, we're not practiced at this situation. Is it you putting yourself into these situations over and over where your brain says, oh, no, I remember this, I can push through this because I've done it 20 times before. Whereas if you've only experienced this one or two times, you're going to listen to the brain to say, no, I want you to stop. How are you. How can we, how can we manipulate ourselves to push through that?

Well, surely experience is key here. Right. It's one of the. One of the things we can do is start to get a lot of practice getting uncomfortable and realizing that although it might feel like we're on the verge of, you know, really doing harm to ourselves, we're actually safe and everything is fine. And that. That is an acquired taste. Right. And some athletes take to it more than others. And I think people who stick with endurance athletics and are particularly competitive have to come to grips with the fact that going fast is going to be uncomfortable. And so you give them workouts where they get to taste that in practice. And I think it requires experience with competition for all of us to start to calibrate ourselves, our perceptions of perceived exertion and so forth, and start to trust that we can go a little bit further, a little bit deeper when we need to. So surely experience is one thing. You know, I think about going from just a straight endurance phase, maybe when you're coming back from. From a rest season and when you first start to do harder intervals, again, how hard they are. And it's always astonishing. You feel like, I can't imagine that I used to do. I used to make it through these. Right. But then after a little bit of time, you get used to it again. And it's. Of course, you're getting changes physiologically, but you're also getting changes in terms of the brain adapting and allowing you to be calm in the midst of discomfort. So one of the things that's important, I think, is to think about the things that amplify those discomfort signals from what we know about how the brain works. Our sense of what gives us a sense of pain. For example, we have these incoming sensory signals, nociceptors. There's a big sensory component coming from the muscles and so forth, sending information up to the brain. And we can't do a lot about that. But on top of that is a second system consisting of a bunch of areas that are involved in thought and in emotion that makes sense out of those signals and interpret them and that we can do a lot about. So practicing being uncomfortable, relaxing into it, trying to hold our form for a bit longer than we did last time. Those are ways of taking advantage of that second system, that cognitive emotional system. The inverse of that would be to start to stress out about it, to start to catastrophize about how bad this feels, which is. Is kind of like amplifying those sensory signals and making the pain worse. So we do have control over the intensity of those experiences and coming to grips with that through practice is one important way. I would say the other way is what we started talking about here, which is when the brain is fatigued, when the brain is under fueled, and a number of other factors, but those are the two. I think a lot about those signals are also amplified. So if we can start to reduce central fatigue, for instance, it's another lever we can pull to allow people to go a little bit deeper, to push that functional capacity a little bit higher.

So I guess that is the next topic to dive into is how to reduce central fatigue. Because, yeah, as you both just described, everyone has had that experience where you're. It always happens in that third quarter of the race or the effort where it's at its hardest, but you're further away, enough away from the finish that you do start over, catastrophizing or dramatizing the effort, and therefore start asking yourself things like, what's the point of this anyway? I'm not going to make it. I'm not going to. Just all the negative thoughts come through and you deviate that reward exactly what you're saying. And when you can push through that, suddenly when the finish line is in sight, suddenly you have this burst of energy again. And everyone has experienced that. And we talk a lot about just some layman's tactics, really understanding that self talk dad was talking about, but also just understanding the data. And one trick I say to myself is keep looking at the pace, even though it's feeling really hard, I'm right on pace. And so if I just keep this to the end, it's a really good performance. And so your brain's trying to tell you to slow down, to stop. But just understanding what's objectively true is really helpful because we do see a lot of athletes, they were right on pace, but then their brain gives up and they catastrophize and stop. And they say, oh, I didn't think I was going well. But you say you were right on it. If you just had to keep going like that, you're on track for a PB or something. But in their head they thought they were going poorly. And so I guess that comes down to their central fatigue is not allowing them to think rationally and think smartly in that moment. So how do we stop that?

Yeah, well, I think you're exactly right. And so I mentioned a bunch of research in some of this research goes back over a century actually showing that when we bring people to a lab and we induce central fatigue, right, we tire out their mind, their capacity for physical Performance goes down and one of the simplest things that we can all do, and yet I see it neglected by athletes at the highest levels. I have the good fortune of working with a number of very elite athletes, including Olympic level triathletes. And not all of them really are aware of the role that central fatigue plays in limiting their performance. And so one of the first things, and hopefully this conversation will go a long way with the people that are the athletes that are listening to, recognize that that's an important thing they need to pay attention to. So when you're getting ready for a big race, when you're tapering, you're resting your legs, you wouldn't go out for a long ride or a long run, the night, the day afternoon before your, your big event? Well, that's also not the time to be taking on a lot of cognitively demanding decision making tasks and extra workload and those things. If, if you're headed into your important race, you need to be doing some kind of mental tapering just like you're doing physical tapering. And I get it, that's very hard to do when you've got responsibilities at work and responsibilities, family responsibilities and so forth. But for these A level races that you really care about, putting some time into planning ahead, how can you disconnect from some of those demanding activities and also being mindful of the kinds of other optional things that you might be doing that are adding mental fatigue. So there have been some nice studies now showing that, you know, spending a lot of time engaging with social media generates central fatigue. Video games generate central fatigue. Those are probably two things that you can let go of in those, those days leading up to your event. But if you're not aware of that, you, you might think, well, I'm resting my legs, you know, I've got my compression boots on and I'm playing a video game or I'm, I'm scrolling on Instagram. I'm all for putting, putting the compression boots on, but what can we do to really rest that brain? So things like, you know, mindfulness work is really good here, right? We know that when people engage regularly in even short bouts of mindfulness practices, it is very good at lowering central fatigue. If you're headed into your race and you know that's not a habit that you've cultivated, you can just start to think, what can you take off your plate in those final days as well? It'll make a big difference to being fresher.

Interesting some of the points you make and as human beings, not everybody thrives on structure. But the majority of human beings, if they're planned and organized, things seem to generally go better if you have a good structure. And so when you come to the taper period, you're really structuring your week around decreasing the physical load. And the thing you're talking about here is to try and emulate that with your central nervous system or your brain to do the same thing. But unfortunately, if we let our brain idle, we actually sometimes increase the anxiety because you start thinking about, because you're not so busy anymore with your normal daily routine of work and, and all the things that you were normally engaging in. Now you're asking the athlete to taper mentally as well as taper physically. But practically that sometimes has a inverse reaction to create more anxiety towards you. Just think constantly about your performance and the event and you're getting yourself so hyped up pre event, you actually can't race well. Yeah. How do you think about tapering your brain during that period? What tools do you use for your athletes?

Well, I mentioned one of them and I agree with you. Right. If, if it. The thing it, for most of us, it wouldn't be good to lock ourselves away in the hotel room and, and just sit there for 12 hours before our race and probably go buggy. It's about finding moderation. Right. It's not that. I guess my message is it's not the time to be taking on extra things or, or ratcheting up. I see this with many age group athletes. I'm not, I have all this free time now because I'm not training so much. So it's a good time to do home projects and, and maybe get, get ahead on work and, and things like that. I think that's a mistake. So adding extra stuff, the, the mindfulness stuff practices are really good. And you know, when I, when I was running the brain imaging lab at the University of Oregon, we had a visiting scientist from China going to do a study looking at mindfulness practices with, you know, undergraduate university students. And they were going to learn to meditate. It was a short period of time, like 15 or 20 minutes, three days a week. And he was very interested to see the, whether his hypothesis that this would decrease stress and improve focus and energy would actually play out and then what, what sorts of things would happen in the brain. And honestly I thought this is one of those studies where it's not going to work, you know, but being the director of the center, of course I wanted to be very supportive for all the science that was going on there. And I ate my words. It worked swimmingly. And what he found is that not only did this light amounts 15 or 20 minutes, three days a week over about a month, cause the students to be able to manage their attention better, to have more energy and to perform better in cognitive tasks, but a particular network of areas in the brain called the default mode that is kind of ramped up act, ramps up its activity when we're not engaged in a focused task. That that network is also responsible for the. The chatter in our mind. So you were referring earlier, Jordi, to, you know, the negative thought loops we can get into in competition, but those that little narrative in our head is kind of going all the time. Right. The default mode network is responsible for that. And what was really cool about this study is that as they progressed further across the month of meditation, that default mode network tended to decrease its activity and those internal ruminations tended not to be as omnipresent as they were before the mind tended to be quiet. So I think long winded answer to your question, Gerard, but I think that I really think that athletes have a lot to gain from even small amounts of mindfulness practice done regularly, and that that can be very helpful in reducing cognitive fatigue, not just before big events, but all the time, so that they carry more energy into training as well.

The point on social media has really stood out for me, not just because of the direct impact of social media, but what that kind of represents that we talk so much about how important recovery is for endurance sport and specifically for age group athletes. We talk about how we're all trying to model the pros, but the pros get to train like pro athletes and then recover like pro athletes. You know, and as age group and, and everyday athletes, we try to train like them, but then we go work a full day and have other responsibilities and a lot of families and young kids that trying to look after. And so recovery just becomes so much more important than we realize. And then to hear that just as little things as simple as social media that's actually fatiguing our brain even more is such a big red flag for me to hear. For all athletes to go, we need to pay attention to this and try and fix it. But I'm just wondering what else can we do during the day to just help improve our recovery rate and help take the load off our brain and central nervous system? And some questions that come up are, and you did mention this on a previous podcast, which I really love, which was removing barriers to decision making. It's so hard when your brain's tired and not functioning well to try and make good decisions. And you found that people who had less barriers to this decision making or to more decisions to be made could cope better. Is that an example or what else could we do?

Yeah, well, I think Gerard really hit on it when he said that most of us really benefit from structure. And if you're trying to have balance a career, maybe you have a busy home life, maybe you even have kids and so forth. And triathlon, where you're trying to improve in three different disciplines, structure is absolutely vital and it's vital in terms of organizing your time for the obvious reasons. But every time that you have something structured, you're really taking one decision away, one less decision that you have to make. So you know that tomorrow morning, this is when the alarm goes off. This is what I'm going to eat. And my swim bag is by the door. It's packed. You're not racing around in the morning wondering where your goggles are, discovering that your suit's still in the wash machine. That's the stuff that kills us because then we, then our stress goes up. We're making a lot of extra decisions that were unnecessary. This all could be streamlined. So I think for busy people who are trying to do is demanding a sport is triathlon. This kind of structure is vital not just for the organization of time so you can fit it all in, but so you can decrease the central load by having fewer decisions to make. And I think this is also why having a coach is so important. Right? Because if you have a coach, you now have a partnership where somebody is writing your plan for you so you don't have to get up in the morning and think, what am I going to do at the pool today? Well, you know, I did, I did 50s yesterday. Maybe I should do two hundreds today. Oh, I don't know. How do I feel? Those are the real killers in terms of accumulating cognitive fatigue. So anything an athlete can do to reduce decisions decision fatigue is very real.

Is there any science behind training morning, first night? Because myself personally much prefer the morning for those reasons where it's just set and forget get up and do the thing. Whereas if I for some reason have to train in the evening or afternoon, suddenly there's a whole bunch more decisions to make around that because what am I eating during the day? What do I eat two hours before making sure I'm organized with that, organized with work to get everything done before that specific time. So is. Yeah, is there ruinous there between morning versus night.

I don't have any science on that. Maybe it exists, but if it does, I don't know it. But I will tell you from personal observation, thinking about athletes that I work with, I'm particularly thinking about one of the triathletes that I work with who is professional and has a lot of control over their time, but still has to get the work done and is doing, you know, a typical week might be north of 25 hours. So a lot of training has, has a plan, has coach writing the plan, but has a lot of latitude for when to implement those trainings. And what we were finding is that there was a, there was a lot of unnecessary cognitive fatigue around just the issues. You were saying because could get up in the morning maybe, you know, the pool was good because the pool is structured. Usually there's certain hours you can go there and do it. But, but you know, so I get out of the pool, now what happens? Well, you know, I could have a snack or I could take a nap or I could go for my ride and then, you know, okay, well maybe today I'll take the nap. And then you get up from the N and you realize, oh, I really haven't had lunch yet. And now you've had lunch. And then you need another couple hours to let your stomach settle before the run gets in. And pretty soon your workday is dragging across, you know, 12 hours. So for the pros this is even an issue. Right? I think for the amateurs, usually this is the window of time you have. You better get it in whether it's morning, noontime or evening. But, but in all cases, at any level, the structure is key.

It's so interesting. On our podcast we, Jordan and I have always talked about the school captain theory and people are intrigued. But what is that? If you look at any 18 year old, 17 year old who is a high achieving student at school, they are so busy. They are probably the vice captain or the school captain. They're probably the best at some of the sports in the school. They're probably the highest academic achievers yet they seem to fit their study in their training, in their sleep, in their nutrition, in. And it's because they've got this ridiculous regimented structure which is fantastic for them to be a high achieving person. And the concept of winging it kind of doesn't really help. And there are people who can, there's no doubt about it, for every rule there is exceptions. And I love the fact that you're saying, you know, we push our Strategies, plan, prepare, perform. That's actually what we push in our, in our program. And so you can't perform without being well planned or well prepared. And the things you're talking about is having checklists for the next day's activities, you know, at 8:00'. Clock. And some people say it's just so regimented that I'm not enjoying my life because everything's struck to be by the time. But you have to have some sort of structure in your life to get things done, to achieve when you get to your race day that you can look back and go, look, I've done everything I can with the hours I had available. And you've lessened the impact on your brain's fatigue by not having to make so many more decisions. And I want the listeners at home to really understand what we're pushing here. We're trying to give your brain less opportunity to be in that brain fog of overwhelmed by so many decision makings if you just planned yourself better. And I think that's the thing you're trying to push here.

Yeah, I think, I think the science says, and as I said, there are sep. There are over 70 studies now showing that if we induce mental fatigue, physical performance goes down. I think we're pretty, you know, we're, we can be pretty secure in thinking that there's a cause and effect relationship here. You don't need to train more. This is low hanging fruit, right? You're the athlete who decides, you know, I don't have time for another interval session or I might not recover from that. But what I'm going to do is really invest in trying to get better at reducing my cognitive fatigue through some of the things that we've been talking about. There are performance gains right there. Without more training that, that can be had. And I really believe, based on the science and what I've seen with my own athletes that this is well worth the investment. And I think part of why we haven't thought that much about it is that sports science is very neck down in the approach. Right. We have great models for metabolic systems and cardiovascular systems and neuromuscular systems. The brain is a very complicated system. We're only now beginning to understand things, but I think we're at a point and that's what really motivated me to start cerebral performance where there are things that we can be doing based on the brain science to affect performance.

I absolutely love that calling it a low hanging fruit is just music to any triathlete's ears, where what's something I can do that would improve my performance. That's. It's quite easy for me to start implementing. And these are all such achievable things to implement to help reduce that overall fatigue. And one other area you go into is actually then taking another step and going, okay, these are all the things you could do to reduce fatigue. But how can we train fatigue? And so what does a cognitive training week or session look like for your athletes? How does that get implemented?

Yeah, so this is the newer angle on things. So over the last 15 years or so, there's been accumulating research suggesting that we can kind of flip the coin around and we can start to introduce very carefully metered amounts of cognitive load and cognitive fatigue in combination with physical training. And that our central nervous system will adapt, our brain will adapt to that additional load, provided that we're doing it in a structured and progressive way and allowing for adequate recovery. So the idea is that we're going to pair up brain training. We're going to artificially induce cognitive loads. Right. And I can explain a little bit more detail in a moment, what that looks like in partnership with your physical training. So the easiest way to think about it is an athlete comes in from a hard workout, maybe they had a tempo session today on the run, they're fatigued, they walk in the door, they put on a dry top, grab a bottle, and sit down and do 15 or 20 minutes of very demanding cognitive tasks, which are going to then force that tired central nervous system to also have to make a lot of decisions in a short period of time in a way where they're under a fair bit of pressure as well. And what we see is that in the beginning, cognitive performance is not very good if we compare it to when they're rested. But with training, and if we do it progressively, we make sure they're recovering, their performances start to go up, so they start to show adaptations where they're able to make decisions more accurately, more quickly, and less variably with this kind of paired training.

And so how much cognitive training does that take? And to see that kind of result, how much work do you actually have to be doing on top of your physical training sessions?

Yeah, so we can look to the science, which is kind of how I always base things. And these are early days in this kind of work. So a little bit is building off of the science, as we talked about at the beginning of the podcast, adapting it to the real world. And what I have the athletes doing presently, and kind of where we've settled is the balance between what would be optimal and what is actually able to be implemented in the real world is three sessions a week. Typically for my typical athlete, each session is lasting somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes. It depends what phase of the year we're in. If we're in a kind of endurance block, we will actually try to capitalize on the fatigue that they're accumulating in their endurance work. And we'll also push it a bit on volume. If we're in a race phase, like many of my athletes are at this time of the year, we're going to have them doing less duration tasks, lower volume tasks, but higher intensity. But we've got to build up to that, we've got to get to that point just like they do with their physical training. So typical week might look like coming in and having two, two sessions when they're already pre fatigued for a workout. And then more recently I've been starting to do some kind of very intense but short interval based training where they're interleaving these blocks of, of brain training with physical workloads. So these are easiest to do implement on, on the trainer in the indoor, indoor cycling. And what we'll, we'll do is we'll kind of gauge them, for example, off an athlete's heart rate. So we'll get them working in an interval and then we'll, we'll get the heart rate into whatever training zone we're wanting them to work on and then hit them with a hard 30 second or one minute block of these tasks where they're making very rap decisions. And we can vary what these tasks are focused on. We can bias them to be more, working more on attention, working more on response inhibition, working more on fast decision making and so forth depending on what the needs of the athlete are. And that's an important part. We do a lot of baseline testing, getting a profile of the athlete and then we start to work on where are the strengths, where are the weaknesses, how can we raise those, those areas where we can start to tune these performance critical brain systems in a way that's individualized.

It's really impressive. We're almost paralleling our physical training to what we already know works with intervals and recovery. And the examples you're giving is we can use meditation for our so called recovery period. As a physical athlete we use meditation, that's our training for that, for that section of the week. And we can use really difficult cognitive tasks to train our brain to think better under pressure when we're fatigued. And And I know that from my own example. I've had some hard sessions where I've finished the session and I've had to do some cognitive task that's quite demanding for me to think through it. And I am, you know, so physically exhausted that I can't get my brain to do the task that I want to do. And over the years, I've actually got better at that. And now I can do a really hard, high intensity training session. And one of the tasks I want to do after that is just sit on the couch and rest. That's what I want to do. But I forced my brain because one of the things in our business is to get the results out really quickly, finalize who did what, what their power was, look at data. And I'm really good now. I used to just flop out on the couch and now I can go straight to the data. And another example I've tried in the last month is I used to do a lot of Sudoku. This is trying to give examples of what you're talking about.

Yeah.

And I've done some training sessions where I've gone straight afterwards and jumped into a Sudoku puzzle. And my brain just can't work. I'm just so tired. I can't find. Think about numbers. And it's, you know, everybody knows Sudoku.

It's.

You're trying to work out how to put the numbers in the, in the right order. And I am so much better at it now after trying this for the last month. And they're just practical examples of what you're talking about. Aligning your physical requirements and your mental requirements to have recovery and to have stimulus from, from difficult tasks. Is that a good summary of what you're, what you're trying to do here?

Yeah, it's a really good summary. And two, Two things come to mind. One is there's. I haven't really spoken about the research that motivates this kind of stuff. And rather than get, get too far in the weeds in our limited time, I'll just say maybe we can link to a paper or two for people. But there's really nice work. A lot of it's been done in cycling because that's something that's easy to study in the lab. Right. We can measure your power output and your heart rate and a lot of variables and with a great accuracy, showing that if you pair cognitive training like we're talking about, systematically and progressively with, With.

With.

With workouts. Right. Structured kind of workouts versus a control condition where you're not pairing the brain training, you've got some other kind of more neutral cognitive something soaking up space, whatever it happens to be. The athletes who are pairing those sessions do better cognitively when they're fatigued. But also what's interesting, and this gets back to the conversation about the fatigue network and the networks involved in perceived effort, they start to show a lowering of their perceived exertion for a given workload. And if we test them on things like 20 minute time trial or look at time to exhaustion, they show performance improvements. So what I'm, what I, what I'd like people to take away is this idea that this cognitive training is playing out in performance improvements, not only in being fresher cognitively, which we know is important given all the decisions that have to be made during a race, but it's also playing out in, in being able to go a little bit deeper to raise that functional capacity ceiling a little bit higher. To thinking about triathlon is a lot of fun because triathlon is kind of unique among endurance sports because you have transitions. Right. And we all know that you can do all the legs of the race really well, but you can lose a race or win a race based on how you perform in those transitions. And a lot of how you perform in those transitions is not physical, it's mental. And so I think there's a lot of benefit here, particularly for triathletes to being mentally fresh, to being able to make decisions quickly and deal with problems when they're fatigued. But it's an exciting space.

Yeah, yeah. But you're definitely saying it's not just about the, about being switched on mentally. Your, your brain fatigue and central nervous system fatigue will limit your physical ability to push harder.

That's, that's, that's right. And if we can, if we can train the brain to, to be able to handle more load in the central nervous system side, we start to see that then it will take the brakes off a bit and allow us to go a little bit deeper for less perceived exertion. Right.

And I guess that's what I wanted to ask next was because at the start we're talking about, here's some things to reduce your overall fatigue and they're long hanging fruit. But then to train it is a whole other avenue which for time poor age group triathletes, it's another avenue. Do we go how worth it is this? Because we're already pushed to the limit. And so for you, for a pro athlete, they want every single second possible because that could be the difference at the Olympics, between a medal, any kind of medal, a gold medal, where do you see it on the scale in terms of going that extra step and trying to actually implement some training sessions, which is quite a big step for someone. Is that a kind of marginal gains tool or is that something that's kind of a game changer? Where, where do you see that for an athlete?

You know, I've been watch, I'll, I'll say this. I've been watching the research come out over the last 15 years and I was very skeptical. I thought no way. Because the, the things that they were reporting, the performance gains seemed to be too much. And a lot of that early work was done in untrained athletes. And we, we know this problem across all of the sport. Sc you could take someone off the couch and have them do just about anything and they're going to improve. But now the work has been moved to well conditioned athletes and we start to see that they're getting, you know, a percentage point or a couple of percentage points. For many athletes, those aren't marginal gains. They're quite, they're quite significant. And so I guess it's always a matter of weighing out the cost and cost benefits. Right. Is it better to could, is this something that could benefit me not only in my, in my athletics, but also ideally, we want athletics to build skills that we carry over to the rest of the rest of an athlete's life or would I be better off getting a new set of wheels? I don't know. It's difficult to compare things that way. But what I've seen in my own application of this with athletes, mainly elite athletes, but I do work some with some quite, quite competitive amateur athletes as well. They're, they're people who've stayed with the program have, have really been exhibiting some pretty remarkable performance improvements and also subjectively feeling a lot fresher at the end of races. But again, you know, it's, it's. These things are difficult to quantify in the real world. There are a lot of changes going on, but the science says it should work. And I, at least in the application, I'm seeing some pretty impressive things. And I do see in their quantitative data their cognitive functioning when they're fatigued improves. It's going up through training.

It's always interesting when you watch some other sports where the, you know, we're talking about the US Open, golf, and there's a, a clutch putt to be made and the person who's had four rounds of golf, the pressure on every single shot and their, their clear mind to know the line pick, the, the strength of the, of the putt and nail that putt. And those people are doing that regularly. They're, you know, the Tiger woods of the world would, you know. And there's many more examples of people who under pressure, have the clear thought process to, to, to go through this. The actual mind thought of getting the line right, getting my stance right, going through the drill that they've done many times before and actually achieving the end result. And in tennis, you could see people who, who are serving for the match and, and they, they either do it well or they don't do it well. And, and that's, that's not, sometimes it is a physical thing because they're exhausted, but they're exhausted is impacting their thought process. So these are the things you're trying to think about. And I know as a marathon runner or as a triathlete, when you get to 36k physically, you are exhausted and you're not thinking as well as you were when you're at the 5k mark and you make no decisions at 36k, instead of making some decisions about, I think I need some more fuel or some more gels or I need to slow down or my heart rate or checking my pace, there's so many decisions that you're not making because you are so fatigued mentally. And so there's so many positives you can do as well. If you get to 36k and you are really well trained at this, you can get huge gains in making better decisions. And I know that when I am so near the limit of maybe if I'm under field and I'm going to bonk and that's, you know, basically I'm going to slow down. I cannot think straight about, oh, why don't I just consume something to enable me to continue this activity? But I'm so fatigued, I can't even lift my arm to get a drink off the bike. Off the bike, bin, cage. So there are examples that I'm talking about that we talked about, you know, is, are there marginal gains to be made here? I just think it's, There are so many examples of, yes, this is an area that's as untapped as anything we've talked about, where new technologies are coming through. I think our brain is one of the areas where we could all do so much better. And there's examples of people I remember as a coach of the high school athletics team and there was one particular runner and he was an 800 meter runner and he was not a big guy, not strong for his age as a 17, 16, 15 year old. But when it came to a sprint finish, he just didn't lose any of these races. And he had trained himself to be in that position so many times where the other guys were out sprinting him. But he just wheeled himself across the line. It was remarkable. Each year we go to the final, the championships of the, of the local state event at our biggest venue and he would win this race year after year. He was about the same physical ability as the rest of the runners, but he just never lost and, and he had that confidence of that experience. But when he got himself into that position every year he drew on those experiences of I can do this, I've proven it. And they're things that I want the athlete, the average athlete out there to remember when you're giving this. It sounds a lot of science, but put it into practical terms. There's huge scope for you to get, as Jordan said, low hanging fruit to get, you know, quite significant gains.

Yeah, I think we really tended to, you mentioned tennis and golf immediately we can realize, wow, the brain plays an enormous role in success or failure there. I think we've historically undervalued the role of the brain in the endurance force that we, we know and love and that there is a lot of opportunity there. You know, look at, look at how Fueling has changed triathlon. Look at how fueling his trains change cycling and running. I mean I've raced marathons on a few sips from a little paper cup of water. I'm sure that you can, you can relate to that, that as well. Gerard. It's, it's like we've really, we've really worked it out. First the science and now the application in the real world. How do we do that? And I see a similar opportunity and the people that got their first, first really did have quite an advantage. Right. Who embraced that. And we've, we've seen that play out. So yeah, I think there are a lot of opportunities here. I work with some pro cyclists as well where you know, the race happens often in the later stages, several hours in when important decisions have to be made and if you're not thinking clearly and sharply and quickly, you're done.

One last topic that we wanted to touch on was a little bit about, I know it's important to you concussions and you've been working with some athletes and this role that this can play in coming back from concussion, it's quite Common for athletes who have a crash to experience concussion and have to rehabilitate from that. So how does this. How does this tie in with concussion work?

Yeah, yeah, thank you for bringing that up. So in my. In my academic work, I had mentioned earlier neuroplasticity, how the brain can kind of reconfig itself and adapt to experiences that we have in the world. And one thing that I was very interested in, and part of my research was on how could we take some of what we know about performance and bring it into the world of rehabilitation for people who've experienced brain injuries. So I've had this ongoing interest. And, you know, recently I've had one of my athletes in particular had a very nasty crash on the bike while out training, got knocked unconscious, and, you know, doesn't remember anything until she woke up in the back of an ambulance. Right. So physical injuries, but also concussive injuries, which are really common among cyclists. Very common, in fact. And a lot of times they're not that well managed. So I'll be brief. But I will say that particularly over the last half dozen or so years, the way we think about the best ways to manage and treat concussion has really changed. It used to be the advice was, and athletes may still get this advice if they go to a center that's not kind of keeping pace with the latest things. You need to rest. Right. We talk about cocooning, where we encourage people to go as far as being in a dark room, getting rid of all sensory stimulation. Well, it turns out that when people did the clinical trials, the. The studies, two things really make a difference in concussion recovery. And the first is aerobic exercise. So getting people going with aerobic exercise as soon as they can tolerate it after a concussion seems to really lead to better and quicker recovery. And for athletes, this is especially important because what it. What a concussion does is it throws your autonomic nervous system into disarray. Your fight or flight, which is one division of your autonomic system, tends to get very ramped up. So after a concussion, people have trouble sleeping, they have anxiety, depression, and so forth. And part of that is because the autonomic nervous system is so. So ramped up in this. In this balance is off, it's in favor of the fight or flight. So heart rate variability will. Will be really low. Often after kind of concussion, exercise helps to rebalance that. It also improves oxygenation to the brain, which puts the brain in a better recovery mode, if you want to think of it like that. The other thing is to harness this Neuroplasticity and to, to help the brain to kind of get rebooted to, instead of taking away stimulation, add graduated stimulation in. And what, what I've been doing with this particular athlete and have gotten very interested in more generally for, for concussed cyclists, is how can we start to train the brain ahead of time for the reasons we've been talking about for the last hour or so, to kind of. If you think about the models in physical therapy of prehab. Right. Is it possible that, you know, you're. You're thinking about this, these kind of brain training results is putting you in a place where the system is stronger and better able to resist any kind of insult or injury. And then on the flip side, I've got data from my athletes before any injuries might have come up. And I can see very clearly in the case of this athlete that there were particular areas that were dramatically affected. And then as we did the training, those start to come back up again, which can be the passage of time and recovery. But I'd like to think that the stimulation is playing the role. So that's another thing that I'm working on. We all know a cyclist who've been concussed, and it's all too common among triathletes as well.

Absolutely. It's a really important point because while we don't want to think about it, unfortunately, crashes are very common. So you, you just want to have that kind of knowledge in advance that this is quite important and if it ever does happen to you, then, yeah, it's important to be a bit more informed and up to date on the science. So appreciate you saying that. So to wrap up and kind of have some final takeaways, do you have maybe one simple or easy cognitive training task or practice an athlete could try this week?

Yeah. So it's a little bit more in depth when you get into building programs for people and software and so on. But I think it would be kind of an interesting thing to take a page from your book, Gerard, and find something like a Sudoku or a wordle or some kind of demanding task, try it when you're fresh, but then come back in and give it a try when you're completely knackered from one of your harder sessions. And I would encourage that just to, just to test that and see is cognitive fatigue playing a role here? And, you know, I don't really have a lot to say about whether, how you could sort of take advantage of things like that to build resistance in these systems. It seems possible to Me, I think the thing that we're doing is a bit different because we're able to progress things systematically and have a lot of variety. But why not at least demonstrate to yourself the value of managing this load and give it a try, Take some things off your plate. Maybe give up the social media or the video games in the 24 or 48 hours before your next race and see if that doesn't help. Right. Make a list. Structure things so that you're having fewer decisions in your training and so forth. And I think with time you'll find that things do improve.

Fantastic. And so what's the next step for you? What are you working on next? How are you trying to really merge this intersection of brain and physical performance?

Yeah, so one of the things we're looking at a lot right now is really starting to come up with some physical workouts that are designed to build certain kinds of, I guess, cognitive capacities that are important for performance. And I alluded a little while back that the brain is wanting to anticipate and predict the future and it's adjusting our behavior accordingly. And so one of the things that I'm quite interested in and experimenting with some of the athletes is putting them in unpredictable sorts of workouts. So instead of giving them a standard workout where they know the interval is going to start at X time and end at X time, what if we start to introduce some unpredictability there so they don't know. They know how hard they're going to have to go, but they don't know how long they're going to have to hold it. We start to within reason, introduce this kind of stochasticity or randomness to, to those workouts as a way of getting them to better be able to manage the kind of unpredictability that comes about when we're in mass start competitions with other people and others maybe are controlling and forcing us to react to pacing changes and so forth. So that's one of the things we're working on and taking that into the realm of various endurance sports where those are factors.

Absolutely brilliant. We've very much enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for joining us. Where can people find you from here?

Yeah, I'm easy. CerebralPerformance.com is the website. I try to keep it reasonably updated with things and I, I've been trying to get more of the science on there. That's kind of an ongoing project of mine and then they're always welcome to just drop me an email. I'm Scott cerebralperformance.com. i'm happy to, to speak with people very passionate about this concussion work and so want to make sure that people get steered in, in the right direction so that they're, they're doing the right things after those kind of injuries and so forth as well. So always happy to have people connect.

Well, thank you very much for this conversation. We really enjoyed it.

Thank you. I really appreciate it. Nice to meet you both.

That's it for this episode. We hope you enjoyed listening, and we'll see you on the next one. Sam.