May 23, 2025 • 63 mins
Dr. Scott H. Frey is an internationally renowned neuroscientist and psychologist, accomplished endurance athlete, author, and teacher. Scott helps individuals and groups identify and realize their aspirations. He can be reached at: Scott@CerebralPerformance.com
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Trail and ultra runners.
What is going on?
Welcome to another episode ofthe coop cast.
As always, I am your host,coach Jason coop, and back on
the podcast for his third trip.
This week we have Scott Fry,phd, and this week's topic is a
fascinating one all about brainendurance training how to train
(00:29):
your brain just like you trainyour muscles to handle more reps
and hopefully improve athleticperformance.
Scott and I get into it and, asalways, this is one of my
favorite conversations.
Scott's always been a favoriteguest of mine and a favorite
guest of yours.
Also along the journey is CoachAdam Ferdinand.
We're going to be coming in acouple of times to talk about
(00:50):
how we practically take some ofthis information from Scott and
deploy it with our athletes.
I hope you guys enjoy thispodcast.
It's a really special one.
Here is my conversation withScott Fry all about brain
endurance training.
Okay, scott, welcome back tothe podcast.
Thanks again.
Offline, we're talking about anepisode that you and I recorded
(01:12):
a long time ago.
That served as a little bit ofa template for some of the new
formatting that we did, and so Ihope you caught wind of the
re-release, but my point withbringing that up on air is that
it's one of the kind of morecited or one of the episodes
that I get the most feedback on.
So people are into this brainstuff, as you're probably very
(01:33):
well aware.
But I'm telling you from acoaching side and from an
athlete side people, it makes amark on people.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
That's great to hear.
Thanks for sharing that, and Ialways look forward to our
conversation.
It's good to see you again.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Yeah.
So I came up with a perfectintro bridge for this, which was
actually quite easy, becausejust this week the Cocodona 250
has been going on.
It's a 250-mile race in Arizona.
It goes from kind of thenorthern part of the Phoenix
area all the way up to Flagstaff.
That I've actually doneContinuous nonstop.
The men's leader will do it injust under 60 hours, the women's
(02:05):
winner will.
I think this year was closer to64 hours, 63 hours and 50
minutes, now that I remember itcorrectly.
It's kind of notorious any ofthese long, you know multi-day,
over 100 mile races.
One of the one of the keyfeatures of them some might call
it a benefit is that they gothrough copious amounts of
mental fatigue, primarilyinduced by sleep deprivation,
(02:29):
but also the physicality of therace itself, and so, with that
as a little bit of a backdrop,one of the things that I was
reminded of is, you see thesefinish line interviews of people
, and usually at that time theycan be rather energetic, right,
they finish, they're on a littlebit of an adrenaline high and,
having been there myself andalso witnessed this, that energy
(02:51):
and that mental clarity thatmight appear for the few moments
, or maybe even 30 or 60 secondsof the finish line
precipitously goes away after afew minutes and they go from
being able to, you know, talkand come up with complete
sentences and good subject verbagreement and the whole nine
yards to not being able to untietheir shoelaces almost in a
(03:14):
span of just a few seconds.
So mental fatigue is real, Iguess, is what I'm saying Like
Cocodona 250, and anybody who'sbeen watching it can certainly
appreciate that.
But there've been, like we'regoing to talk about that, and I
think that all cheekiness asideof the sleep deprivation and
things like that, there are realsources of mental fatigue and
(03:35):
some of those I just went over.
To start out with a little bitof a backdrop, both from a
clinical standpoint and thenalso from an experiential
standpoint, where do those kindof like fatiguing points
actually come?
From the physical side, thestaying upside kind of like all
of the above what introducesthese points of fatigue, so that
we can have a little bit of alevel set for what we're
(03:57):
ultimately going to talk about.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yeah, so I think, as athletes, we think a lot about
fatigue and recovery, and it'susually focused on our muscles
and how can we get themrecovered so we can get the next
workout in and adapt to thestimulus, and so forth.
But you know, as a career brainscientist, I'm very aware of
the fact that the centralnervous system, the brain and
(04:21):
the spinal cord accumulatefatigue as well.
Right, there are physiologicalentities, in the sense analogous
to muscles, if you want tothink of it that way, and a
bunch of biochemical changestake place when they're being
worked, and those demandrecovery as well.
So we have things like theaccumulation of adenosine.
(04:41):
It acts like a neurotransmitterin the brain.
It's something that accumulatesover the course of the day as
it goes.
A neurotransmitter in the brain.
It's something that accumulatesover the course of the day as
it goes up.
We get more fatigued.
Caffeine blocks adenosinereceptors, so it buys you time,
and then, when that wears off,of course, the adenosine comes
back to roost.
One of the things we know,though, is that when you're
(05:01):
putting out a lot of physicalwork, there's also a mental toll
for that, and you can look atcognitive performance in
athletes who have donestructured work in a lab,
running on a treadmill, ridingup, cycling or something
well-controlled, because wescientists really love that for
good reason right, and you canshow that there are acute
(05:24):
changes in cognition withintense training and their
performance goes down.
We get slower and less accurate.
And there are also chronicchanges that accompany training
loads, and those are mostextreme when people are
overreaching or overtraining,but they happen during the
course of normal training aswell.
So when you talk about athletescompeting in these kind of
(05:46):
ultra distance races, yes,there's the whole sleep
deprivation, which I would thinkof as more on the lack of time
to recover the central nervoussystem, but there's also, if we
wanted to just back that off andlook at races that are
completed in the course of anormal sleep-wake cycle, where
you're not disrupting your sleep.
(06:06):
There are going to beaccumulated mental fatigue and
so forth.
I work with athletes whosecompetitions are not
ultra-distance and there'splenty of evidence that
cognition changes as a result ofgoing deep physically, and I
think it's one of the majorunderappreciated effects on
performance.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Well, and what we want to get to ultimately
through the course of thisconversation is if this can be
trained and, if so, how.
Because that's the questionkind of plaguing athletes,
sports scientists and coachingalike is that if we recognize
that mental, we'll use the bigumbrella mental fatigue and you
can probably add someclarifications and nuance to
(06:48):
that big umbrella but if werecognize it as an important
contributor to performance, wewant to be able to affect that,
Just like we can recognizemuscular strength or
cardiopulmonary capacity ordurability, which continues to
come up in this podcast,especially over the course of
the last four, six months evennutrition components and things
(07:09):
like that, which we're nowrecognizing are trainable.
If this is trainable, how do weactually go about and how do we
go about it and actually trainfor it?
Because it's one thing to say,yeah, this is like super
important.
That's another thing toactually go out and like
positively affect it so thatit's so that it's actually
better.
Before we get to that, let'slike continue to level set right
, because we understand, like weunderstand, some of the
(07:30):
components of of mental fatigue,but what does it actually do to
performance?
So we have this big broad brushstroke and I think it's easy to
say, okay, if you're mentallyfatigued, your performance is
actually going to decline.
But can you put a little bitmore of a microscope on that and
explain how performanceactually declines through mental
(07:50):
fatigue?
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Yeah, so it's quite interesting, and you can call it
mental fatigue.
I think of it always in termsof neurophysiological terms.
It's brain fatigue.
It's literally fatigue in thebrain.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
An organ, right An organ.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Yeah, that's right.
It has downstream effects onperformance that are pretty well
documented.
So at this point there's beenover 70 studies, lab-based
studies, where they'veintroduced fatigue by putting
people through, say, mentallydemanding, cognitively demanding
tasks and then looked at howthat affected a wide variety of
(08:27):
dependent measures.
So these would be things thatgive us a kind of quantitative
measures of performance like howfast can someone complete a
time trial?
How much power can they put outon a bicycle for a certain
amount of time?
What happens if we measure timeto exhaustion when riding or
(08:47):
running at a fixed pace or rateand so forth.
To have been 70, 70 plus, Ithink it's up to 73 now, studies
demonstrating the effect ofthese kind of introducing an
artificial mental load or brainload having effects on physical
quantitative metrics ofperformance like the ones I
mentioned, and we can take thatto specifically to those span
(09:12):
strength athletes as well.
And if we there's been studiesthat just look at endurance,
performance and effects hold uppretty well.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
One of the things that always sticks out to me in
any of those studies and we'regoing to try to synopsize the
whole basket of them at once, sopeople who are people who are
really into this stuff will haveto forgive us for not drawing
everything out but one of thethings that is always quite
remarkable to me, whenever I'velooked at maybe not all 70 of
(09:40):
those, but a lot of them, is howseemingly benign the mental
fatiguing task is, or the brainfatiguing task is we normally
think of like a pre-fatiguingtask, as something to failure.
So if we wanted to test likestrength on a bicep curl, we
would do it to failure.
We do 100 reps or something likethat and then test the strength
(10:02):
of it afterwards and comparethat strength after that.
You know ultimately fatiguingload or a load to fatigue I
think that's the best way to putit the load to fatigue in that
state versus in an unfatiguedstate, and everybody can
recognize.
Okay, I'm gonna do as manybicep curls as I can until I
can't do them anymore, I'm gonnarest for 30 seconds or whatever
(10:24):
the interval is, and then I'mgoing to do a maximum voluntary
contraction and I'm going tocompare that with the, with the
pre-fatigue state, and of coursethe one at the end is going to
be less than the one at thebeginning by a pretty
precipitous amount.
But I guess my point with thatis is the fatiguing intervention
is something grand, it'ssomething big.
That's usually when I read the,when I've read these studies.
(10:45):
Not the case with pre, likewith the mentally fatiguing
component of it.
So can you describe like alittle bit to the listeners, to
just like paint that picture alittle bit better yeah, I would
love to.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Oh, and I'll start with one of my favorites.
It goes way back.
It goes back to the late 1800s,amazingly enough, when the
first we first realized thatmental load affected physical
performance was done by thisItalian scientist,
neurophysiologist, angelo Mosso.
He built a little contraptionwhere people could lift a weight
with their finger.
So he really got a simplesystem to test his modeling
(11:19):
right.
But he could do it veryquantitatively and he'd hang
these little weights and they'dhave to curl it.
Time to exhaustion was hismeasure and he did a bunch of
studies with his colleagues, hissubjects who were his fellow
professors and students and soon, of like exam season and
(11:47):
really busting it, workingthrough people's dissertations
and oral exams and all thisstuff and we're really on the
limit.
So he didn't really quantifythe mental fatigue, he just said
these guys are physically,these are mentally fatigued
people and he showed that infact the performance would drop
off, like their time toexhaustion, and this muscular
task would fall off.
Now of course that, like manythings in science, gets lost and
(12:07):
then kind of rediscovered lateron.
So we've circled back around,you know, in the last, let's say
, 20 years or so, and kind ofrediscovered this idea.
It started to introduce mentalfatigue in more modern ways.
So a common way, like from myworld of cognitive neuroscience,
is to have computerized taskswhere people have to.
Usually the scenario issomething like there's some kind
(12:30):
of visual stimulus or auditorystimulus and difficult in a way
that increases their difficulty.
That allows us to see thosechanges in speed of performance,
accuracy of performance, andthat's the typical thing that we
(12:53):
would do in a lab.
But outside the lab, you knowwe could we should probably
spend a moment or two justtalking about, like what are the
sources for an athlete headinginto a competition?
The travel, right, right, thedecisions about gear, the, the
disruption of the training cycle.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
I mean, they're just a load of these things so
real-time example once again,coming back to the cocodona 250,
and just to like to put a pinon the visual stimulus, the way
that I like really simplify thisfor athletes is you're matching
words and colors to each other.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
That's it sometimes, yeah, I mean, that's one way
that's one way.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
But I mean, but most people say green, okay, I can
match the green box to the wordgreen, or I can.
You know, the word green is inred and I have to pick the red
box, like that kind of thingthat you're not solving a
quantum physics equation.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Right.
And certainly there are thingswe can measure easily right and
we can titrate and dose.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
Exactly and when we bring this into reality once
again, using the Coca-Dona 250as an example, many people are
doing exactly that in the daybefore the race and going
through all of their gear andall of their nutrition and every
single calorie that they haveto pack and all of the hydration
(14:13):
requirements and logistics andstuff like that, saving it to
the very end, creating this big,mentally fatiguing task before
another really big, mentallyfatiguing task, other really big
mentally and fatiguing task,and so it's a great example of
these things that that if youknow how they're kind of
contrived in a lab, you can seethe actual realistic analogs to
(14:34):
that and perhaps createsituations and maybe not so much
of an intervention butsituations to kind of to kind of
avoid those.
Okay, I wanted to take a quickbreak in the interview and bring
in coach Adam Ferdinandson todiscuss how we actually help
athletes navigate some of thestress leading up to the race so
(14:55):
that they get to the start linewith minimal mental fatigue.
Adam, what do you think aboutthis?
Speaker 3 (15:01):
Yeah, I think this is a classic area of something
that really deserves a lot ofattention and effort and
sometimes doesn't get enoughattention and effort, maybe
relative to the training itself.
So when it comes to planningout your travel to a race, you
really want to be thinking aboutthese things.
You know, with how early youget there, do you have time to
acclimate?
Is it a new time zone?
(15:21):
All those things that can letyou arrive to the start line
more rested Upgrading your seatchoice on a flight, going first
class those little things candefinitely be helpful and put
that on the front end of thetrip and then you can cram
yourself into coach on the wayback.
Just start putting your brainin that mindset of thinking
(15:43):
about things that can help youjust show up to the start line
in a comfortable, non-fatiguedstate.
I think we've all gotten to arace start line feeling a little
frantic and overwhelmed.
That's a pretty rough way tostart an ultra marathon.
So there's that.
And then also you really wantto consider the overall life
(16:05):
stress that you have going intoan event.
I've seen that play a reallybig role.
So if someone makes asignificant move or has some
other big life change dependingon who you are, that can take a
big toll and you want to respectthat and how you program the
training, and then also thatmight impact how you approach
the week of the race too.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
So from a practical standpoint, here's how I handle
it with a lot of athletes If,especially if, I'm going to be
at that race, I'll force all ofmy athlete meetings to be on
preferably the Wednesday, andthen second preference would be
the Thursday before race.
That starts on Saturday.
And the reason that I do thatis is to not try to shoehorn
(16:48):
everything into the Friday andthen leave an extra day.
If you need to change something, you need to work your drop
bags a little bit differently orwhatever, and my whole goal
with doing that is to free up atleast one day, maybe two day,
two days for all that mental youknow all that mental space.
We've all seen the athletesthat wait until 10 minutes
(17:08):
before the drop bags are due.
They're cramming stuff in atthe last minute and there's a
cost to that and that's what alot of Scott's research and a
lot of what this conversation is.
There is a cost to that mentalstress and that mental fatigue
that's associated with leavingsome of those logistics until
the very last minute.
So the point is well taken totry to get all of that stuff
(17:29):
kind of off the table as earlyas possible in the week so you
can literally deload your brain,just like you're deloading your
body.
So we can appreciate thatmental fatigue.
It does indeed impactperformance, right, that's been
shown very clearly.
(17:50):
But can we also say thatdifferent athletes, throughout
the course of a race or courseof events, fatigue differently
from a mental side, just likethey do physically, just like
people have different time toexhaustion tests, 10k time,
trial times and things like that?
Do we kind of see the samemental profiles or brain
(18:12):
profiles across a physicallyfatiguing event?
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Yeah, and we actually have some science about this.
So there have been.
There's kind of this niche areawhere people have looked at
expertise in different domains,and one of those domains is
athletics, and when you look atelite endurance athletes and you
start testing their ability tosustain focused attention or to
(18:36):
engage in tasks that put a lotof demands on rapid
decision-making or responseinhibition or error recovery,
you find some interesting things.
What you find is they'reexceptional in these ways as
well.
So the study I'm thinking of inparticular looked at
professional cyclists and itlooked at their cognitive
abilities and then it looked atwhether putting them under these
(18:58):
kind of contrived loads, likewe were talking about, mentally
affected their performance ornot.
And at least in the study I'mreferring to now, they performed
exceptionally well in terms ofshowing resilience to that kind
of mental fatiguing load,whereas the recreational
cyclists, who are the group theywere tested against, showed
(19:20):
declines in critical power andtime to exhaustion and things.
The pros are more robust to thatand as someone who works with
professional athletes and insome of whom are cyclists, it's
not surprising to me at all.
Mass start bike racing aremassively cognitively fatiguing
tasks.
They have to be on pointmentally, because a lot of the
(19:43):
decisions that are going todetermine the outcome of the
race are made when you're verydeep into things, and it's very.
You're very physically fatiguedand also mentally fatigued.
So the fact that the cream ofthe crop would be exceptional in
terms of the brain, as well asthe muscles and metabolism and
cardiovascular systems, makes alot of sense.
(20:03):
And then the question, ofcourse, is that why they're pro
athletes Is?
that another reason why did theyget better at that right From
having having done that allthose years always a chicken in
the egg.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Question right Is does this, does it create the
good athlete, or are they goodathletes because of that?
Speaker 2 (20:21):
And it's probably both.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
You're absolutely right, it's probably both.
Now that's neither here northere in terms of trying to
solve this problem of can weactually train this, but I think
the next thing that we need todo to help conceptualize this
for the listeners is to try toput some sort of quantitative
performance decline on some ofthese events, and the analog
(20:47):
that I like to use in this iswhat we try to do with hydration
.
Right, where we know a certainpercent of dehydration causes a
marked decrease in performance.
Call it 10% or 8% or whateveryou want to actually do, but
it's not 1% and it's not 50%,right, we try to put those
things into relative context,and the reason that this is
(21:07):
important is because when you'retalking about introducing an
additional training interventionto an athlete, you always have
to weigh the potential cost ofthat intervention, whether it's
time or energy output or evencost.
Right, there's a cost to someof the if you think about
aerodynamics, right, in cycling.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
There's a definite cost to some of the, to some of
the time savers.
You always have to compare thatwith the benefit that you're
actually getting.
Is it 1%, is it 2%?
Is it 10%?
Is it 100%?
I know we hate to really pinthings down.
If you do this you're going toget a 2% improvement in
performance, but can we justgeneralize a really fatiguing
(21:53):
mental task that's introducedinto an endurance task?
How much is that going toaffect that task overall?
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Yeah, Well, the answer is complicated, as you
knew it would be.
But if we look across thestudies and, like I said,
there's been over 70 of thesestudies now and if you wanted to
do a back of the envelope, andthe problem with the studies is
you've got, you know, you've gotelite athletes, you've got
people off the couch, you've gotpeople in between.
So it's of course theseinterventions are going to
(22:23):
affect them all differently whenit comes to their capacity to
work, but I think it's probablyon average I would be
comfortable saying a couple ofpercentage points, which is a
lot, especially for those folksat the pointy end.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Okay, and so it's actually like critically
important right here, right now,everybody can think about the
race that they're training for.
If you have a few percent marginbetween what you want to do and
what you think you can do atyour like, maximum capacity or
whatever, which is always alittle bit of a guessing game,
an intervention like this makesa lot of sense If you're looking
(22:57):
at, hey, I need to make 12%improvement or something like
that.
It needs to be something likethis plus something else, and so
that's what I mean by we haveto evaluate the cost of the
intervention in terms of theimpact that it actually, that it
actually has to have.
There's a lot of athletes outthere.
They just in terms of theimpact that it actually has to
have.
There's a lot of athletes outthere.
They just need to train more,because they're going to get
better overall if they just add10%, 20% more volume or better
(23:19):
training or whatever it is.
So it's important to know thatgoing into it, that we're not
going to make superheroes out ofathletes that aren't very good
in the first place.
You've got to have a goodathlete to start with, right.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Yeah, I like to tell people, if someone's talking to
you about double digitimprovements by doing anything
nutritional recovery, trainingyou probably should continue
looking, because this is not howthings work, you know.
It's interesting, though, jason,because if you look at, there's
a beautiful meta-analysis of abunch of studies that have
looked at the effects oftapering across a bunch of
different endurance sports soswimming, cycling, running,
(23:59):
rowing and on average, thebenefits of tapering are about
right around 2% according tothat meta-analysis, and, of
course, a lot of variables there.
Right, we're talking differentsports where the types of tapers
were different, but I thinkit's probably on par with that,
and I like to say to peoplewould you go to your A race
(24:19):
without tapering?
And everybody says no, right,of course they wouldn't.
So if you think that this couldbe on par with that, then maybe
we need to start having aserious conversation about are
there things we could do in kindof the spirit of mental fatigue
or brain fatigue, hygiene?
Are there changes we can makein your life right that are that
(24:41):
will leave you a little bitfresher?
And then, of course, thetrainability which we'll get
into okay.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
So this we're gonna, we're gonna go for the jugular
right now.
Now that we've set this up,this, this might seem I need to
come up with a less violentexample of how to set that up,
just as an afterthought.
Now you really have my interest.
All right, here we go.
So this might seem like acompletely biased perspective
here, but I'm going to ask youpoint blank Do you think that
(25:08):
it's trainable?
Speaker 2 (25:09):
I do, you know, and I'll tell you why.
So you know my background.
I was 30 plus years as acognitive neuroscience and
professor, ran a big lab focuseda lot on neuroimaging and image
performance.
That was my specialty, Got10,000 citations, all the
academic boxes checked.
I'm a skeptic and I saw thisresearch coming out on people
(25:32):
using brain endurance trainingand, if you want to call it that
, to try to develop fatigueresistance in these
performance-critical systems andoffset the effects that we've
been talking about.
That stuff's been coming out,let's say, for the last 15 or 20
years and I was super skepticalof it, but I watched it develop
and I watched the papersaccumulate to the point where I
(25:55):
needed to pay attention to itand take it seriously.
And I've been digging throughthat research and following that
research and pulling ittogether and I'm satisfied that
there's really something there,to the point where I work with a
small number of elite athletesOlympians, high level performers
and we've really committed todoing this training now as part
(26:19):
of their plans.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
So what does it look like?
Because everybody's going towant to know what like like.
Because when we talk aboutinterval interventions, people
want to know do I do the fourminute interval or the eight
minute interval, or?
the 32nd interval, what's theconstruction of it and things
like that.
Peel it, peel the curtain backand yeah, first off, I want the.
(26:40):
I'm going to step back just alittle bit before we get into it
.
I hope the listeners canappreciate because I certainly
can Somebody who is a leader intheir field, who ends up being
the ultimate skeptic ofsomething, turn their opinion
around based on both what theresearch was saying and then
also what they see in practice.
I think that's the ultimatetestament to there's something
there, not there's this onestudy about this one person,
(27:04):
this one case study here.
I heard this person tried this.
This is, like you said 30 yearsof experience and looking at
some of the initial researchwith a high, first off high IQ
of the domain that you are, thatyou've been working in, and
then ultimately coming aroundand saying you know what,
there's something here, and thenputting your kind of like, your
money where your mouth is, yourpractice, where your mouth is,
(27:25):
where you're actually doing thiswith athletes who hopefully
like where they're going to makea difference.
So just hope everybody canappreciate that.
That's just kind of a statementfor me, because I think when I
run into professionals that havean arc like that.
I always pay attention to it,so let's talk about what it
looks like.
What does it look like?
Speaker 2 (27:45):
Yeah.
So I think a nice way to talkabout this would be to just give
people an example of how itlooked in the lab and then how
it looks in practice lab andthen how it looks in practice,
or at least how it looks inpractice with my athletes, if
you don't mind.
Yeah, let's do it, we do that soyou know, one of my favorite
studies in this area and I thinkprobably it would be a
candidate for one of the mostnicely done studies is one by
(28:07):
Chris Ring's group at Birminghamand the first author, Stiano.
People can take a look at it.
Maybe we can put it in thenotes.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
I'll link it in the show notes.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Yeah, they have two studies.
I always love a scientificpaper that has the original
study and then they go and tryto replicate their own findings
in the same paper, and they didthat.
They had a group of controlsubjects who were undergoing the
same training program as theexperimental subjects.
These were experienced cyclists, they were like cat two, cat
(28:36):
three, road racers, and thedifference in sort of the
treatment was that, followingthese very structured cycling
workouts, which they did fourtimes a week for six weeks, the
experimental group would get,would undertake this demanding
cognitive task and this soundsreally hellacious like 30 to 45
minutes of the stroop task.
(28:58):
Okay, oh geez that's a lot to dothat, yeah, so explain explain
to the street test really quickimagine you're sitting there and
these words are flashing up onthe screen and the words are
color words.
They're like the word green orred or blue, and sometimes the
(29:19):
word green appears in green,let's say, and sometimes it
appears in orange, and your taskis to name the color of the
word but ignore what the wordactually says, right?
So when the word says the samething, it says green and it is
green.
That's very easy.
But when the word says blue andthe color is green, say of the
word blue, there's aninterference because our brain
(29:40):
automatically we're such goodreaders it automatically
activates the word blue, but ofcourse you're trying to name the
color, the ink that it'sprinted in or shown on your
screen.
You get a massive interferenceand this is like one of the most
widely used tasks in all ofexperimental psychology, because
the effects are so substantialand it causes you have to
(30:02):
inhibit that automatic responsein order to do it correctly.
So imagine doing that forgetting gassed on a set of
intervals, then coming back anddoing that for 30 to 45 minutes.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
It's pretty horrible, but they got people to do it I
would rather I would rather dococodona four times than do a
stroop test for 45 minutes,because just doing it for 60
seconds is just mind-numbing,like it's anyway, keep going
yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
So imagine these people are doing this for six
weeks.
At the end of the six weeks,they find that the group that
did the cycling training plusthe cognitive training gets a
bump in time to exhaustion whenthey're tested cycling at 80% or
65% of their critical power,compared to the group that just
(30:51):
did the cycling training andthen listened to neutral sounds.
I think that was the control.
So then they do the secondstudy, where they do the similar
manipulation, but the testingis different.
They have a 60-minutesubmaximal ramp test for cycling
and they show that improves,and so does the 20-minute time
(31:11):
trial performances of the peoplewho did the cognitive training
for six weeks, in addition tothe physical training, compared
to that control group.
But what doesn't improve is thefive-minute all-out power
effort.
This is really about trainingsomething that helps these more
(31:37):
sustained efforts.
Okay, which should be ofinterest to your audience.
Now, the reason I'm telling youthis about this study is to
answer your question about whatthis looks like in practice.
What it looks like for myathletes in practice is not what
it looks like in the study thatI just described.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
Okay, Thank God for your athletes.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Well, they don't leave, right, I mean, no one
would be able to sustain that.
And so what I've done is canstart to adjust the intensity of
that task, analogous to how youmight adjust the intensity of
(32:18):
intervals that a runner is doing.
There's a lot of variety of thestimulus.
Think about going to the gym.
Right, you go to the gym.
If you just do the same thingall the time, you're not going
to get the kind of adaptationsthat you want, because you would
adapt to the stimulus.
So they're progressive, thestimulus is varied, and what
we're trying to do here is driveneurophysiological adaptations,
(32:44):
neuroplasticity right, we hearthat word a lot what it really
is.
Increasing the strength of theconnections between neurons and
circuits, right, we're trying todrive these kind of adaptations
in these circuits to make themstronger and more efficient.
And the analogy to the muscle,I think, is reasonable here.
So my athletes are doing thesekind of wide variety of tasks.
(33:06):
We're progressing the intensityand we got it down to around
three sessions, 20 minutes a pop.
So inside of a week, usuallyafter their harder workouts,
they come in, get their wetclothes off, grab a bottle, sit
down and bang out these taskswhile they're still fatigued
(33:27):
from the workout that's thecritical point for about 20
minutes and I get greatcompliance on that because I
they're interested, they'remotivated, but they're also
getting a lot of stimulation, alot of variety, because they're
not just doing the same thingfor the whole time.
Speaker 3 (33:45):
Okay, and I found that, oh, go ahead.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
I just have a few questions before we kind of go
on here right yeah, so the tasksthat you're prescribing, are
they like problem solving typesof tasks Like I have to solve a
simple math problem or I have todo a maze or something like
that?
Or are they more visualmatching pieces, like all of the
Stroop tests?
Or is it kind of a battery of alot of different things?
(34:13):
You don't have to reveal thewhole thing, I'm just trying to
get a general sense of what thetask is.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
I'm happy to.
So yeah, so it's a greatquestion.
So I've kind of grouped thetasks.
They come out of my world ofcognitive neuroscience.
The tasks are tasks that havebeen used in that world and
research unrelated to athleticsover the years, and I have tasks
that are kind of grouped intodifferent categories depending
on which cognitive functionsthey put the most load on.
(34:37):
So the Stroop task puts a lotof load on inhibiting those
automatic responses and theStroop test is one of many tests
that we would use.
We have other tasks that arehaving you use focus attention
and look for a target among abunch of distractors, right, so
using your perception and yourfocused attention to identify a
(34:58):
target.
We have others where you mighthave a different kind of
stimulus, that is, let's say, wehave others where you might
have a different kind ofstimulus, that is, let's say, a
number, and you've got torespond differently if the
number is an even number, an oddnumber.
So we're getting you to makevery quick and rapid decisions
and you're under a lot of timepressure.
So generally I think of ourtasks as there's a group of them
(35:18):
that are focused more onperception and situational
awareness.
There's another group that'smore on attention, another on
rapid decision-making andinhibition of automatic
responses.
So response inhibition.
And then we have some othertasks that are really
emphasizing, like speededsensory motor responses.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
And it's always in a fatigued state.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
Yes, so if you look at the research, it started out
with them kind of interleavingtraining and these cognitive
tasks, which is great to do in alab but very impractical out in
the field.
So you go in the lab.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Just to describe this to the listeners and correct me
if I'm kind of butchering thisexplanation.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
If you're doing a 10K run every three or four
kilometers, you would dosomething, so you'd interrupt
your training to do the task orto do the brain training or
riding a stationary bike ordoing an interval, and then in
the recovery, doing things, andI sometimes, in certain
(36:23):
situations with my athletes,will, with a cyclist in
particular, interleave thesetasks with an interval workout.
It's trickier with runners.
There are ways to do it, butwhat we found, and what the
research has found, is thathaving these tasks done right
after physical training, whenpeople are still fatigued from
(36:44):
the physical training, seems toproduce very comparable effects.
So that's most convenient,generally speaking.
If we were to do them beforetraining, that can be a problem
because it can compromise, as wewere talking about the, the
actual training, but we don'twant to do that.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
So I was actually going to ask the like almost the
inverse of that question.
So, yeah, you understand thatif you did it beforehand you'd
potentially compromise thephysical training, which we
typically don't like to do.
There are certain situationswhere you'd want to do it, but
most of the time you're tryingto maximize the training.
But does it potentially have animpact on the recovery side of
things?
Because you know how thesethings go in arcs right First
(37:23):
it's the brain and then it'srecovery and then it's, you know
, some, you know like somethingelse and recovery is becoming,
you know it kind of always hasbeen, but it's always been a
little bit of a hot topic.
We're trying to maximizeeverything we're doing to.
There are some athletes and Iknow and I do know a lot of
high-level coaches in a lot ofsports that adhere to this where
they insist on a wind-downperiod right after the activity.
(37:46):
So take three to five minutes,decompress, get into a state to
where you're optimized forrecovery and adaptation.
Could this potentiallyinterfere with that or do you
have a way around it?
Speaker 2 (38:00):
Yeah.
So I think it's a really goodpoint and I'll and I have two
answers for you.
One we know that mental fatigueaffects vis-a-vis the brain.
It affects the autonomicnervous system.
We can see effects of mentalfatigue on heart rate
variability, right that areanalogous to the effects we see
in athletes from hard training.
So that's something we need tothink about, right.
(38:23):
But with my athletes, theprotocol that I found best for
them is that we get them startedon this within 30 minutes of
training.
And I chose 30 minutes notrandomly, but because the
research.
When we look at performance oncognitive tasks after athletes
have done hard exertions, it'sabout a half an hour before
(38:45):
performance comes back up tonormal, depending, of course, on
the duration of the physicaloutput and so on.
But that 30-minute window, Ithink, is a critical time to get
them started on these tasks.
So come in, get dry clothes on,grab a bottle, start
rehydrating and replenishingyour glycogen and then sit down
(39:06):
and bang these out.
So it's not a matter of youknow, you're dripping sweat all
over your iPhone and you'retrying to get it done without
destroying the device and you'rebonking your brains out and all
that stuff.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
The sensitivity between the end of the workout
and when you start.
This, it seems to be seems toallow for a little bit of
physical recovery, it seems to,and you know this is.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
You raise great points.
I mean we just don't have theresearch that's looked at, all
these different factors, as inso many domains, right, what is
the optimal amount of time interms of task placement and so
forth?
I'm telling you now, guided bythe research but also
experimenting in practice withmyself and my athletes, what I'm
(39:51):
finding has been working for us.
So I think that minimumeffective dose that we're
finding with these eliteathletes is about about an hour
a week broken up into threesessions high intensity sessions
, but about 18 to 20 minutes persession piggybacked on at the
end of either a high intensityworkout or a big over distance
(40:15):
workout, when people arecarrying okay, I wanted to take
another quick break in theaction and bring back coach Adam
to talk about this from areally practical point of view,
on how we actually handle thisas coaches.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
So first off, adam, do you have any athletes that
you're actually doing this withand, if so, what are you
actually doing?
And if not, why wouldn't you bedoing them with that?
Why wouldn't you be doing thiswith them?
Speaker 3 (40:40):
So the answer is no.
I do not do this with anyone.
I think there are use casesthat I'm interested in and I'll
be happy to take, say, 30% ofthe credit of just you know.
Maybe I should be, but I thinkmost of it is that a lot of
people aren't necessarily a goodcandidate for it.
And those good candidates mightbe, say, an elite athlete,
(41:02):
where a couple of percentagepoints matter, or someone who
has tackled so much of the restof things that this is now a
worthwhile place to look for animprovement.
But quite honestly, for thehost of my athletes, I think we
have more to gain elsewhere.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
And that's what a lot of athletes are kind of
wrestling around in their mindsright now.
To conjure up that image iswhat am I going to get?
Is this actually worth it?
And I think your point is welltaken, where you know Scott's
working with a handful of eliteathletes on this.
I have some athletes that aregood candidates for this, but
I'm still in your boat whereit's hard to fit the criteria to
(41:42):
actually to have an athletethat is actually ready for it,
and then you actually have tohave the practitioner that can
deploy it.
You know people like Scott andother.
You know another mentalperformance specialists out
there.
They are few and far in betweenand much fewer and further in
between than a sportspsychologist or some or
something of that nature,because this is a specialized
(42:03):
intervention within a, within aspecialty provider.
So the access alone kind ofmakes it a little bit, kind of
kind of makes it a little bitproblematic for a lot of
athletes.
But then you're absolutelyright that that many athletes
they can do more miles, theycould just get more fit, fit,
and that's going to be the bulkof their improvement.
So while the all of this isintriguing and I certainly think
(42:25):
that we absolutely need to payattention to it and use this
intervention.
With certain athletes, there'sa whole range of things that
that that make it eitherincompatible with the athlete's
lifestyle or something wherethey're just not a good
candidate for it.
Speaker 3 (42:37):
Yeah, I think for the time being, I definitely lean
towards avoiding the negativeconsequences of what some of
what you and Scott talk about,rather than proactively training
our ability to handle it.
Speaker 1 (42:51):
Okay, so twofold question.
Well, first off, go over.
Let's just review theintervention dose in terms of
frequency per week and number ofweeks that you need to see some
sort of reasonable improvementagain yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
And well, there's another good question.
Okay, if we look at theresearch that's out there, there
haven't been that many extendedtraining studies.
The one I mentioned to you fromchris ring's group is my
favorite because it did sixweeks of training right, four
times a week.
My athletes are doing thisstuff in a kind of periodized
way, like they do their normaltraining plan.
(43:25):
So we've got like a pre, we'vegot a base phase, a
pre-competitive phase and acompetitive phase that we kind
of rotate through.
And you know they're working onthis in parallel with their
training.
Yes, they take a training break, they take time off the bike,
they take time off of running.
If they're triathletes, theytake a break as well, but we get
(43:45):
back into it just like they dowith their training plan.
So we're kind of doing our ownreal world extended programs of
this that are spanning.
You know, in the longest case Iguess we're up to six months
with some of my athletes, andyou know.
One other point I want to makeis that and I think this is a
really important one I'mconstantly monitoring levels of
(44:06):
fatigue in the central nervoussystem, and so I want to just
tell you how I'm doing that.
It's super simple and relatedto what we've been talking about
, but I don't think there's agreat replacement for asking
people how they feel.
I think it's super important toknow a person's subjective
state, but I think we can dobetter.
There's more we can know andthere's something quantitative
(44:27):
and not subjective, moreobjective, that we can be doing.
And if you look at the researchon mental fatigue not in
athletics but in cognition andpeople have been studying mental
fatigue, cognitive fatigue,brain fatigue, in workplace
environments, in militaryenvironments for a long time you
can use response times insimple tasks like we're talking
(44:48):
about and show that you knowwhen people are fatigued, their
responses on average get slower,they become less accurate and
more variable, and thatvariability is a really
important point.
So in every training sessionwith my athletes they do a
three-minute task.
It's dead simple, boring ashell.
(45:09):
Visual stimulus comes on thescreen.
They just have to respond to itas quickly as they can.
It doesn't come on rhythmicallyso they've got to think a
little bit, but it's just quick.
It's measuring the time ittakes to perceive something
visually and pass that throughthe sensory parts of the brain
to the motor system in the brainand then send the command down
the spinal cord and that's a wayof getting a quantitative
(45:32):
measure of the amount of fatiguean athlete is carrying in that
central nervous system as webuild up a profile for that
individual over time.
It's not something.
Oh, look, you took the test,you've got an A, a, b, a, c.
We've got to look at the overtime.
You know I get three of thesesessions a week from these
people.
They're doing months.
I can start to see the patterns.
(45:53):
I can start to see, oh, they'rein a heavy period of stress
right now.
It may be you know you havesomebody and you know they're
going through an illness,they're going through an injury,
they're just got done with theyou know 250 mile race or
whatever it is.
I see that in and we adjust.
We're constantly adjusting andtitrating their load, just like
(46:14):
a good coach would do in anytraining.
Speaker 1 (46:16):
And when you're doing this, is it being deployed on
an iPad?
Because I know a lot of peoplewill think of the visual
stimulus with something like theBlaze pods or any of the other.
I can't, I'm failing toremember some of the other
companies out there that producethese, but the little LED
things that light up that youwill actually touch, you can put
them wherever.
Yeah, yeah, like, how are thetests actually being deployed?
Speaker 2 (46:37):
Yeah, so back in my lab days we spent a lot of time
writing code and programmingthings, and fortunately I've
partnered with a company nowthat actually provides software
that I can use to customconfigure tasks and push them
out to people's iPhone or iPad,and so the way it looks for my
athletes is they'll get theirweek of plans right and I'll get
(47:00):
their data back and I canconstantly be adjusting in the
background and titrating whatthey're getting and deciding
when to progress, the intensity,when to back things down, and
so forth.
But yes, they're doing these oneither an iPhone or Okay.
Speaker 1 (47:13):
So here's the half a zillion dollar question, and
then the zillion dollar question, afterwards the half a zillion
dollar question is so, withinthe task, you're obviously
monitoring this.
Do you see improvement withinthe task, just like we would see
you know if you're titratingthe intensity up, we would look
at the, we would look atintervals and, okay, the
intervals are getting better,worse or staying the same.
(47:33):
That's the first part of it.
But the zillion dollar one, orthe quadrillion zillion dollar
one, is can?
What are the actual athletesactually saying about their
performance, and can you trackanything from a performance side
of things?
Speaker 2 (47:46):
Yeah, so the first question is that, yes, just like
any training stimulus, peoplestart to adapt and they get
better.
Right, they start out.
It's like whoa.
This is really difficult, andthat's why we need to keep
progressing the intensity ofthat stimulus, just like you do
with your athletes and theirtraining programs, and so that
that's something we'reconstantly doing.
(48:06):
And, as you know, with any kindof training it's non-linear,
right, it's not like every weekbuilds on the next it's just you
know, going off into infinity.
Um, there are ups, there aredowns and so forth, and that's
where the hand tuning and thingscome in.
And I've got some nice software.
Is an amazing thing.
We can do such such intricatethings.
(48:27):
We can set thresholds wherepeople have the task actually
start to adjust in difficultyaccording to their performance.
Hold them kind of like ridingyour bike on a trainer in erg
mode.
Think about it like that.
For the bring.
There's just a lot of nicestuff we can do to progress
things and keep people workinghard and driving those
adaptations throughneuroplasticity.
(48:47):
The second thing is anecdotal,right.
So I cap my one-on-one work withelite athletes at 12 because I
give them my heart and soul in asense right.
We're engaged in a lot ofcommunication.
This is only a part of what Ido with these athletes.
We work a lot on all the othersorts of mental and brain and
(49:11):
psychological skills to supporttheir performance.
This kind of, I would say,synergistic training is
something we do, but it's by nomeans all we do.
And what I see coming back fromthe athletes, their self-report,
is that they feel like they'regetting deeper into their races
and having more mental clarityand being able to be clearer
(49:32):
about decision and alsoexperiencing these slight
decreases in perceived exertionfor fixed efforts, which I think
is super interesting.
My athletes are very bright butthey're not spending their time
reading this research.
They're full-time athletes,they're busy, they have a lot
going on, but these are the kindof reports that I would expect
(49:56):
if we were starting to see someof the effects that the research
is claiming.
So I find it very encouragingwe're getting on podiums Now.
That's very hard to connect.
Speaker 1 (50:07):
Yeah, I mean, they're great athletes.
Speaker 2 (50:12):
They get on podium right, but their self-report is
that they're also feeling likethey can go a bit deeper and
feel fresher to make the kind ofcritical decisions they need to
make to be competitive I meanhere's deepened.
Speaker 1 (50:27):
Here's how I view any of these like interventions,
right, if you have a mecca, ifyou have some sort of plausible
mechanism of action, that's thefirst step.
And then you have research thattests that plausible mechanism
of action and that goes in thesame direction as the mechanism,
as the proposed mechanism does.
That's the second step.
(50:48):
Then you have really smartpeople start to deploy this with
athletes and military personneland emergency response
personnel and things like that.
That's the next step.
That goes in the same directionas what the researchers
indicate is what the mechanismof action would indicate.
And then, when you have theathletes saying the exact same
thing that the research says,that the smart people say that
(51:11):
the mechanism says, if all ofthose direction arrows are kind
of like lining up in terms of,yeah, the effect should look
like this, then you havesomething that you can actually
like, really, really latch onto,because, for better, for worse,
performance is always theultimate outcome that we're
always chasing.
(51:31):
And I say for better because ifyou can test an intervention
and their performance getsbetter, there's absolutely
something there.
Most of the times there'sabsolutely something there now,
because performance ismultifactorial, you have to
realize that there are alwaysother things that go into it,
and you can never chalk up apodium to oh my gosh, it's all
of a sudden brain endurancetraining.
(51:51):
Or oh my gosh, it's all of asudden it's the supplement.
Or oh my gosh, all of a sudden,it's the shoe choice.
Right, it's what we've kind oflike latched onto our equipment
choice, and so, for better orfor worse, we're always chasing
that performance piece, and sowhen you are looking at the
performance piece, I do thinkyou have to have the other
directional arrows kind of analignment as well before kind of
taking it under like seriousconsideration to do, because
(52:12):
otherwise you're going to chasearound too many things oh,
absolutely, and there willalways be every study, that of
every uh clinical study rightthat we could think of for
medications and this and thatand the other.
Speaker 2 (52:24):
They're always responders and they're
non-responders.
And why people some peoplerespond better than others are
the great mysteries of the world, and it's certainly true for
training and certainly true forthe stuff we're talking about.
But we have we didn't get intoit much here, but but we have
some reasonable ideas andmechanisms.
There is a fatigue network inthe brain.
(52:44):
There are a bunch ofinterconnected areas in the
brain that we can see infunctional magnetic resonance
imaging that are affected whenwe put people under fatiguing
cognitive loads.
And it just so happens thatthere's a lot of overlap in
terms of the areas in thatnetwork and the areas that are
involved in computing perceivedeffort and perceived exertion.
(53:04):
And what I think is that thatis the mechanism by which brain
fatigue gets translated intochanges in performance.
It's an effect that comesthrough our sense of perceived
effort, perceived exertion andkind of lowers the ceiling a
little bit on how deep we'reable to go our functional
(53:26):
capacity on any given day,because you've got a
physiological cap right.
There's the ultimate thing thatif you go beyond it, there's
utter collapse, but we're neverthere.
The brain is putting the brakeson before we get there, for
good reason.
That ceiling the brain sets isthe functional capacity, and if
we can get a little bit betterfunctional capacity, that's when
(53:49):
we have the breakthrough.
So that's what we're working on.
Speaker 1 (53:51):
So an athlete wants to go through this and I think
it's worth mentioning.
You glazed over this.
This is one of the tools inyour arsenal that you're
deploying with athletes.
Right, just like field.
Two max intervals is one of thetools in my arsenal that I
would deploy from a programmingstandpoint with athletes is just
one one thing.
So don't like, stop everythingelse you're doing and do brain
(54:14):
endurance training just, but ifyou're considering it, so option
a is hire you right, you'recapped.
You're capped at 12.
And, as is the case with everypractitioner right, Including
myself, we have functional capswith athletes that we can only
work with so many.
But athletes want, like aresource so absent that like
working with you directly, likehow would an athlete DIY this
(54:35):
for themselves?
Speaker 2 (54:36):
Yeah, I think it's a great question and I think it's
a tricky one, and I'll tell youwhy.
Because all the things thatwe've been talking about, I
think there are a lot ofelements that go into making
this work, like with most kindsof training, this progressive
intensity, like a lot of variety, to keep people attentionally
engaged and willing to complywith these tasks.
(54:57):
It's tough DIYing it.
I think you know there aredefinitely apps out there where
you can get the Stroop test, forexample, and kind of bang away
on this, but it's one of thosethings that I think is somewhat
analogous to.
You know, you can get chat, gptto make a training program for
you, right, but it's not goingto be the same kind of
(55:21):
experience that you have whenand I don't think you can
reasonably expect the same kindof performance changes that you
would get if you hired you to,you know, coach them.
So it's tough, right.
I think the basic conceptstands, though we want to
combine physical load and mentalload to try to get at this
(55:41):
synergistic effect onperformance, and so that's the
key bit.
Now, you're right, I don'tthink this is a standalone thing
, any more than I think, likeyour example, that VO2 max
intervals are a standalone thing.
You got to be doing all theother stuff, and I think this
works best.
I've yet to have an athlete,jason, come to me just for this.
(56:03):
That wouldn't work.
That's not how I work.
Everything else has to be inplace, right.
The athlete has to be doing thephysical training.
They have to be doing thenutrition, doing the recovery.
All of those boxes need to bechecked.
What we're talking about hereis something more on top of that
for the person who's looking totake it to the next level, for
(56:26):
the person who's going toaltitude to get those bonuses
you can think of.
This is kind of something likethat.
Right, you don't go to altitudeif you're not doing all the
things that we just talked aboutfirst.
Speaker 1 (56:37):
right I'd be remiss if I didn't like at least ask
the question on how to hack ittogether, because ultra runners
are kind of like notorious.
They're notorious for doing that.
I always think of the saunatraining that the Badwater
athletes would do, where theyroll the treadmill into a sauna,
and I can see the analog tothat in this case being like
doing their teenagerstrigonometry homework after
(57:00):
they've done an interval session, or something like that.
But what you're trying to sayis it's like, in order to do it
correctly, in order to get theright progressive overload term,
that we would use trainingright To create an adaptation.
It you can't just you can'tjust wing it right.
It's got to be done in anintelligent fashion.
Speaker 2 (57:17):
I think so, you know, and I'm a real DIY guy myself.
So I like the idea of like,let's figure out how we can do
this ourselves, and I wouldnever discourage people from
trying that.
I mean, if you can find somecognitively demanding, loading
tasks to do, I would say try,try 20 minutes of it.
(57:37):
It's got to be intense, you'vegot to find ways of having
variety to the stimulus andprogress, the intensity.
But if you can figure out howto do that, I'm a little bit at
a loss to think how to do thatOnce I convinced myself that
there was really something here,then the question became how
can I make this work?
I didn't want to go back to thedays of the lab where I had
(57:58):
programmers and we were kind ofhacking this stuff together and
then figuring out, let alonefiguring out, how to push it out
to people.
Yeah, I'm not intentionallytrying to hold out on people or
anything.
I just think that we've talkedabout some of the key parameters
that I think come out of theresearch but also come out of
the art of applying this kind ofstuff.
People could use thoseguidelines and go out and try to
(58:20):
try something, why not?
I don't think there's harm todoing it.
I don't think there's a side,you know, risky side effects or
something like that, and that'sa nice thing about this.
Speaker 1 (58:29):
Yeah, the cost that I was talking about earlier,
right To set up this whole valueproposition.
The realistic cost is time,right, and then maybe
potentially a little bit ofrecovery, if you really wanted
to like tease that apart.
But you try to mitigate that asmuch as possible and I think,
the interventions where youreally can get a little bit of
free time and I always rememberthis really famous quote by John
(58:53):
Cobb back in the early days ofall of the aerodynamic stuff.
And for anybody that's over 40years old, scott, help me out to
call out John, anybody that'sover 40 years old, scott, helped
me out to call out john wellover 40.
Speaker 3 (59:04):
Yeah, but you'd have to be sorry, 60.
Speaker 1 (59:07):
You'd have to be over 40 to recognize who john like
john cobb's influence onaerodynamics cycling he has this
really great quote.
He's like at a certain point youjust got to buy your speed,
meaning everybody's just as fast.
You kind of just buy the bestcomponents and the best aero
wheels and the best aero barsand things like that.
And what his point with that isis the cost to it is literally
(59:30):
an economic cost to theperformance improvement.
Here the cost of this is a timecost and not an energetic cost
or a risk of injury cost like wetalk about with training, load
increases and things like thatyeah, I think so, and I I am
interested in the possibility ofdeveloping, like, a group-based
way of going through this thatcould accommodate more people.
Speaker 2 (59:53):
I think, though the point stands, that this is
something that could serveathletes well who are already
doing the other stuff, and Ithink with the John Cobb stuff
too, you know, if you're notdoing the training, getting an
aero helmet and aero socks isprobably not going to make is
make the lion's share of thedifference for you.
(01:00:13):
You need to ride your bike moreA hundred percent.
Speaker 1 (01:00:16):
All right, Scott, we're gonna let you go.
This is awesome, as always.
Speaker 3 (01:00:19):
appreciate these conversations with you.
Speaker 1 (01:00:28):
A lot of those and I'm always appreciative of
people who kind of like blazethe trail and, at the same time,
make a positive impact inathletes' lives and careers
careers.
I'm going to link up a lot ofthe things that we talked about
in the show notes, but where canpeople get to know you a little
bit better in some of the workthat you're doing, whether it's
a website, social media, stufflike that?
Speaker 2 (01:00:47):
Well, thank you for your kind comments.
It means a lot to me.
I am at cerebralperformancecom,which is my business, and I try
to keep a lot of content onthere about the science and also
what we're doing, and peoplecan learn a little bit more
about my background there, orthey and people have questions
or thoughts.
They're really welcome to justshoot me an email.
(01:01:08):
I'm scott at cerebralperformancecom, so nice and
simple.
Speaker 1 (01:01:12):
I love to hear from people and pick ideas around
thank you again for your timeI'm always amazed at people who
give out their personal emailaddresses and phone numbers on
this podcast.
We'll have to follow up and seehow many people take you up on
that.
Speaker 2 (01:01:24):
I'm not giving you my phone number man.
Speaker 1 (01:01:26):
All right, there we go.
All right, I'm sure we'll haveyou back on the podcast at some
point, but, man, thank you fromthe bottom of my heart.
This has been amazing.
It is every conversation thatwe've had.
Speaker 2 (01:01:34):
Well, thank you, I agree.
Speaker 1 (01:01:41):
It's always good to see you, Jason.
I love our chat.
All right, folks, there youhave it.
There you go.
Much thanks to Scott for comingback on the podcast for his
third trip.
I always appreciate ourconversations.
As you guys can tell, wheneveryou talk to one of these people
who is a true pioneer, a trueleader in the field, they can
always articulate what they'retrying to do and what the
benefits might be for athletes,for the things that they are
(01:02:02):
actually doing with them inorder to improve performance.
Appreciate the heck out of eachand every one of you listeners.
As always, this podcast isnothing without you.
This podcast is always broughtto you sponsorship and
advertisement free.
That has been my commitment toyou, the audience, ever since
the inception of this podcast.
I can't even remember how manyepisodes we've done.
(01:02:23):
Right now, If you want tosupport this podcast, you have
two great ways that you can doit.
The first way is you cansubscribe to our research
newsletter, Research Essentialsfor Ultra Running, where we take
topics like this and we breakthem down in depth and we
present our take on them in justplain old English so anybody
(01:02:44):
can understand them.
And you can also subscribe orbecome a USCA certified
ultramarathon coach.
I partnered with USCA severalyears ago to create coaching
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and how to train for ultramarathons, realizing that there
(01:03:07):
was kind of a void ofinformation in this particular
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Links to both of those will bein the show notes.
If you want to support thispodcast once again, all you have
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Or if you want to level up yourknowledge game, whether you're
a coach or an athlete, check outthat USCA coach certification.
All right, folks.
That is it for today and, asalways, we will see you out on
the trails.
Trail and ultra runners.
What is going on?
Welcome to another episode ofthe coop cast.
As always, I am your host,coach Jason coop, and back on
the podcast for his third trip.
This week we have Scott Fry,phd, and this week's topic is a
fascinating one all about brainendurance training how to train
(00:29):
your brain just like you trainyour muscles to handle more reps
and hopefully improve athleticperformance.
Scott and I get into it and, asalways, this is one of my
favorite conversations.
Scott's always been a favoriteguest of mine and a favorite
guest of yours.
Also along the journey is CoachAdam Ferdinand.
We're going to be coming in acouple of times to talk about
(00:50):
how we practically take some ofthis information from Scott and
deploy it with our athletes.
I hope you guys enjoy thispodcast.
It's a really special one.
Here is my conversation withScott Fry all about brain
endurance training.
Okay, scott, welcome back tothe podcast.
Thanks again.
Offline, we're talking about anepisode that you and I recorded
(01:12):
a long time ago.
That served as a little bit ofa template for some of the new
formatting that we did, and so Ihope you caught wind of the
re-release, but my point withbringing that up on air is that
it's one of the kind of morecited or one of the episodes
that I get the most feedback on.
So people are into this brainstuff, as you're probably very
(01:33):
well aware.
But I'm telling you from acoaching side and from an
athlete side people, it makes amark on people.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
That's great to hear.
Thanks for sharing that, and Ialways look forward to our
conversation.
It's good to see you again.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Yeah.
So I came up with a perfectintro bridge for this, which was
actually quite easy, becausejust this week the Cocodona 250
has been going on.
It's a 250-mile race in Arizona.
It goes from kind of thenorthern part of the Phoenix
area all the way up to Flagstaff.
That I've actually doneContinuous nonstop.
The men's leader will do it injust under 60 hours, the women's
(02:05):
winner will.
I think this year was closer to64 hours, 63 hours and 50
minutes, now that I remember itcorrectly.
It's kind of notorious any ofthese long, you know multi-day,
over 100 mile races.
One of the one of the keyfeatures of them some might call
it a benefit is that they gothrough copious amounts of
mental fatigue, primarilyinduced by sleep deprivation,
(02:29):
but also the physicality of therace itself, and so, with that
as a little bit of a backdrop,one of the things that I was
reminded of is, you see thesefinish line interviews of people
, and usually at that time theycan be rather energetic, right,
they finish, they're on a littlebit of an adrenaline high and,
having been there myself andalso witnessed this, that energy
(02:51):
and that mental clarity thatmight appear for the few moments
, or maybe even 30 or 60 secondsof the finish line
precipitously goes away after afew minutes and they go from
being able to, you know, talkand come up with complete
sentences and good subject verbagreement and the whole nine
yards to not being able to untietheir shoelaces almost in a
(03:14):
span of just a few seconds.
So mental fatigue is real, Iguess, is what I'm saying Like
Cocodona 250, and anybody who'sbeen watching it can certainly
appreciate that.
But there've been, like we'regoing to talk about that, and I
think that all cheekiness asideof the sleep deprivation and
things like that, there are realsources of mental fatigue and
(03:35):
some of those I just went over.
To start out with a little bitof a backdrop, both from a
clinical standpoint and thenalso from an experiential
standpoint, where do those kindof like fatiguing points
actually come?
From the physical side, thestaying upside kind of like all
of the above what introducesthese points of fatigue, so that
we can have a little bit of alevel set for what we're
(03:57):
ultimately going to talk about.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yeah, so I think, as athletes, we think a lot about
fatigue and recovery, and it'susually focused on our muscles
and how can we get themrecovered so we can get the next
workout in and adapt to thestimulus, and so forth.
But you know, as a career brainscientist, I'm very aware of
the fact that the centralnervous system, the brain and
(04:21):
the spinal cord accumulatefatigue as well.
Right, there are physiologicalentities, in the sense analogous
to muscles, if you want tothink of it that way, and a
bunch of biochemical changestake place when they're being
worked, and those demandrecovery as well.
So we have things like theaccumulation of adenosine.
(04:41):
It acts like a neurotransmitterin the brain.
It's something that accumulatesover the course of the day as
it goes.
A neurotransmitter in the brain.
It's something that accumulatesover the course of the day as
it goes up.
We get more fatigued.
Caffeine blocks adenosinereceptors, so it buys you time,
and then, when that wears off,of course, the adenosine comes
back to roost.
One of the things we know,though, is that when you're
(05:01):
putting out a lot of physicalwork, there's also a mental toll
for that, and you can look atcognitive performance in
athletes who have donestructured work in a lab,
running on a treadmill, ridingup, cycling or something
well-controlled, because wescientists really love that for
good reason right, and you canshow that there are acute
(05:24):
changes in cognition withintense training and their
performance goes down.
We get slower and less accurate.
And there are also chronicchanges that accompany training
loads, and those are mostextreme when people are
overreaching or overtraining,but they happen during the
course of normal training aswell.
So when you talk about athletescompeting in these kind of
(05:46):
ultra distance races, yes,there's the whole sleep
deprivation, which I would thinkof as more on the lack of time
to recover the central nervoussystem, but there's also, if we
wanted to just back that off andlook at races that are
completed in the course of anormal sleep-wake cycle, where
you're not disrupting your sleep.
(06:06):
There are going to beaccumulated mental fatigue and
so forth.
I work with athletes whosecompetitions are not
ultra-distance and there'splenty of evidence that
cognition changes as a result ofgoing deep physically, and I
think it's one of the majorunderappreciated effects on
performance.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Well, and what we want to get to ultimately
through the course of thisconversation is if this can be
trained and, if so, how.
Because that's the questionkind of plaguing athletes,
sports scientists and coachingalike is that if we recognize
that mental, we'll use the bigumbrella mental fatigue and you
can probably add someclarifications and nuance to
(06:48):
that big umbrella but if werecognize it as an important
contributor to performance, wewant to be able to affect that,
Just like we can recognizemuscular strength or
cardiopulmonary capacity ordurability, which continues to
come up in this podcast,especially over the course of
the last four, six months evennutrition components and things
(07:09):
like that, which we're nowrecognizing are trainable.
If this is trainable, how do weactually go about and how do we
go about it and actually trainfor it?
Because it's one thing to say,yeah, this is like super
important.
That's another thing toactually go out and like
positively affect it so thatit's so that it's actually
better.
Before we get to that, let'slike continue to level set right
, because we understand, like weunderstand, some of the
(07:30):
components of of mental fatigue,but what does it actually do to
performance?
So we have this big broad brushstroke and I think it's easy to
say, okay, if you're mentallyfatigued, your performance is
actually going to decline.
But can you put a little bitmore of a microscope on that and
explain how performanceactually declines through mental
(07:50):
fatigue?
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Yeah, so it's quite interesting, and you can call it
mental fatigue.
I think of it always in termsof neurophysiological terms.
It's brain fatigue.
It's literally fatigue in thebrain.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
An organ, right An organ.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Yeah, that's right.
It has downstream effects onperformance that are pretty well
documented.
So at this point there's beenover 70 studies, lab-based
studies, where they'veintroduced fatigue by putting
people through, say, mentallydemanding, cognitively demanding
tasks and then looked at howthat affected a wide variety of
(08:27):
dependent measures.
So these would be things thatgive us a kind of quantitative
measures of performance like howfast can someone complete a
time trial?
How much power can they put outon a bicycle for a certain
amount of time?
What happens if we measure timeto exhaustion when riding or
(08:47):
running at a fixed pace or rateand so forth.
To have been 70, 70 plus, Ithink it's up to 73 now, studies
demonstrating the effect ofthese kind of introducing an
artificial mental load or brainload having effects on physical
quantitative metrics ofperformance like the ones I
mentioned, and we can take thatto specifically to those span
(09:12):
strength athletes as well.
And if we there's been studiesthat just look at endurance,
performance and effects hold uppretty well.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
One of the things that always sticks out to me in
any of those studies and we'regoing to try to synopsize the
whole basket of them at once, sopeople who are people who are
really into this stuff will haveto forgive us for not drawing
everything out but one of thethings that is always quite
remarkable to me, whenever I'velooked at maybe not all 70 of
(09:40):
those, but a lot of them, is howseemingly benign the mental
fatiguing task is, or the brainfatiguing task is we normally
think of like a pre-fatiguingtask, as something to failure.
So if we wanted to test likestrength on a bicep curl, we
would do it to failure.
We do 100 reps or something likethat and then test the strength
(10:02):
of it afterwards and comparethat strength after that.
You know ultimately fatiguingload or a load to fatigue I
think that's the best way to putit the load to fatigue in that
state versus in an unfatiguedstate, and everybody can
recognize.
Okay, I'm gonna do as manybicep curls as I can until I
can't do them anymore, I'm gonnarest for 30 seconds or whatever
(10:24):
the interval is, and then I'mgoing to do a maximum voluntary
contraction and I'm going tocompare that with the, with the
pre-fatigue state, and of coursethe one at the end is going to
be less than the one at thebeginning by a pretty
precipitous amount.
But I guess my point with thatis is the fatiguing intervention
is something grand, it'ssomething big.
That's usually when I read the,when I've read these studies.
(10:45):
Not the case with pre, likewith the mentally fatiguing
component of it.
So can you describe like alittle bit to the listeners, to
just like paint that picture alittle bit better yeah, I would
love to.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Oh, and I'll start with one of my favorites.
It goes way back.
It goes back to the late 1800s,amazingly enough, when the
first we first realized thatmental load affected physical
performance was done by thisItalian scientist,
neurophysiologist, angelo Mosso.
He built a little contraptionwhere people could lift a weight
with their finger.
So he really got a simplesystem to test his modeling
(11:19):
right.
But he could do it veryquantitatively and he'd hang
these little weights and they'dhave to curl it.
Time to exhaustion was hismeasure and he did a bunch of
studies with his colleagues, hissubjects who were his fellow
professors and students and soon, of like exam season and
(11:47):
really busting it, workingthrough people's dissertations
and oral exams and all thisstuff and we're really on the
limit.
So he didn't really quantifythe mental fatigue, he just said
these guys are physically,these are mentally fatigued
people and he showed that infact the performance would drop
off, like their time toexhaustion, and this muscular
task would fall off.
Now of course that, like manythings in science, gets lost and
(12:07):
then kind of rediscovered lateron.
So we've circled back around,you know, in the last, let's say
, 20 years or so, and kind ofrediscovered this idea.
It started to introduce mentalfatigue in more modern ways.
So a common way, like from myworld of cognitive neuroscience,
is to have computerized taskswhere people have to.
Usually the scenario issomething like there's some kind
(12:30):
of visual stimulus or auditorystimulus and difficult in a way
that increases their difficulty.
That allows us to see thosechanges in speed of performance,
accuracy of performance, andthat's the typical thing that we
(12:53):
would do in a lab.
But outside the lab, you knowwe could we should probably
spend a moment or two justtalking about, like what are the
sources for an athlete headinginto a competition?
The travel, right, right, thedecisions about gear, the, the
disruption of the training cycle.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
I mean, they're just a load of these things so
real-time example once again,coming back to the cocodona 250,
and just to like to put a pinon the visual stimulus, the way
that I like really simplify thisfor athletes is you're matching
words and colors to each other.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
That's it sometimes, yeah, I mean, that's one way
that's one way.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
But I mean, but most people say green, okay, I can
match the green box to the wordgreen, or I can.
You know, the word green is inred and I have to pick the red
box, like that kind of thingthat you're not solving a
quantum physics equation.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Right.
And certainly there are thingswe can measure easily right and
we can titrate and dose.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
Exactly and when we bring this into reality once
again, using the Coca-Dona 250as an example, many people are
doing exactly that in the daybefore the race and going
through all of their gear andall of their nutrition and every
single calorie that they haveto pack and all of the hydration
(14:13):
requirements and logistics andstuff like that, saving it to
the very end, creating this big,mentally fatiguing task before
another really big, mentallyfatiguing task, other really big
mentally and fatiguing task,and so it's a great example of
these things that that if youknow how they're kind of
contrived in a lab, you can seethe actual realistic analogs to
(14:34):
that and perhaps createsituations and maybe not so much
of an intervention butsituations to kind of to kind of
avoid those.
Okay, I wanted to take a quickbreak in the interview and bring
in coach Adam Ferdinandson todiscuss how we actually help
athletes navigate some of thestress leading up to the race so
(14:55):
that they get to the start linewith minimal mental fatigue.
Adam, what do you think aboutthis?
Speaker 3 (15:01):
Yeah, I think this is a classic area of something
that really deserves a lot ofattention and effort and
sometimes doesn't get enoughattention and effort, maybe
relative to the training itself.
So when it comes to planningout your travel to a race, you
really want to be thinking aboutthese things.
You know, with how early youget there, do you have time to
acclimate?
Is it a new time zone?
(15:21):
All those things that can letyou arrive to the start line
more rested Upgrading your seatchoice on a flight, going first
class those little things candefinitely be helpful and put
that on the front end of thetrip and then you can cram
yourself into coach on the wayback.
Just start putting your brainin that mindset of thinking
(15:43):
about things that can help youjust show up to the start line
in a comfortable, non-fatiguedstate.
I think we've all gotten to arace start line feeling a little
frantic and overwhelmed.
That's a pretty rough way tostart an ultra marathon.
So there's that.
And then also you really wantto consider the overall life
(16:05):
stress that you have going intoan event.
I've seen that play a reallybig role.
So if someone makes asignificant move or has some
other big life change dependingon who you are, that can take a
big toll and you want to respectthat and how you program the
training, and then also thatmight impact how you approach
the week of the race too.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
So from a practical standpoint, here's how I handle
it with a lot of athletes If,especially if, I'm going to be
at that race, I'll force all ofmy athlete meetings to be on
preferably the Wednesday, andthen second preference would be
the Thursday before race.
That starts on Saturday.
And the reason that I do thatis is to not try to shoehorn
(16:48):
everything into the Friday andthen leave an extra day.
If you need to change something, you need to work your drop
bags a little bit differently orwhatever, and my whole goal
with doing that is to free up atleast one day, maybe two day,
two days for all that mental youknow all that mental space.
We've all seen the athletesthat wait until 10 minutes
(17:08):
before the drop bags are due.
They're cramming stuff in atthe last minute and there's a
cost to that and that's what alot of Scott's research and a
lot of what this conversation is.
There is a cost to that mentalstress and that mental fatigue
that's associated with leavingsome of those logistics until
the very last minute.
So the point is well taken totry to get all of that stuff
(17:29):
kind of off the table as earlyas possible in the week so you
can literally deload your brain,just like you're deloading your
body.
So we can appreciate thatmental fatigue.
It does indeed impactperformance, right, that's been
shown very clearly.
(17:50):
But can we also say thatdifferent athletes, throughout
the course of a race or courseof events, fatigue differently
from a mental side, just likethey do physically, just like
people have different time toexhaustion tests, 10k time,
trial times and things like that?
Do we kind of see the samemental profiles or brain
(18:12):
profiles across a physicallyfatiguing event?
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Yeah, and we actually have some science about this.
So there have been.
There's kind of this niche areawhere people have looked at
expertise in different domains,and one of those domains is
athletics, and when you look atelite endurance athletes and you
start testing their ability tosustain focused attention or to
(18:36):
engage in tasks that put a lotof demands on rapid
decision-making or responseinhibition or error recovery,
you find some interesting things.
What you find is they'reexceptional in these ways as
well.
So the study I'm thinking of inparticular looked at
professional cyclists and itlooked at their cognitive
abilities and then it looked atwhether putting them under these
(18:58):
kind of contrived loads, likewe were talking about, mentally
affected their performance ornot.
And at least in the study I'mreferring to now, they performed
exceptionally well in terms ofshowing resilience to that kind
of mental fatiguing load,whereas the recreational
cyclists, who are the group theywere tested against, showed
(19:20):
declines in critical power andtime to exhaustion and things.
The pros are more robust to thatand as someone who works with
professional athletes and insome of whom are cyclists, it's
not surprising to me at all.
Mass start bike racing aremassively cognitively fatiguing
tasks.
They have to be on pointmentally, because a lot of the
(19:43):
decisions that are going todetermine the outcome of the
race are made when you're verydeep into things, and it's very.
You're very physically fatiguedand also mentally fatigued.
So the fact that the cream ofthe crop would be exceptional in
terms of the brain, as well asthe muscles and metabolism and
cardiovascular systems, makes alot of sense.
(20:03):
And then the question, ofcourse, is that why they're pro
athletes Is?
that another reason why did theyget better at that right From
having having done that allthose years always a chicken in
the egg.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Question right Is does this, does it create the
good athlete, or are they goodathletes because of that?
Speaker 2 (20:21):
And it's probably both.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
You're absolutely right, it's probably both.
Now that's neither here northere in terms of trying to
solve this problem of can weactually train this, but I think
the next thing that we need todo to help conceptualize this
for the listeners is to try toput some sort of quantitative
performance decline on some ofthese events, and the analog
(20:47):
that I like to use in this iswhat we try to do with hydration
.
Right, where we know a certainpercent of dehydration causes a
marked decrease in performance.
Call it 10% or 8% or whateveryou want to actually do, but
it's not 1% and it's not 50%,right, we try to put those
things into relative context,and the reason that this is
(21:07):
important is because when you'retalking about introducing an
additional training interventionto an athlete, you always have
to weigh the potential cost ofthat intervention, whether it's
time or energy output or evencost.
Right, there's a cost to someof the if you think about
aerodynamics, right, in cycling.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
There's a definite cost to some of the, to some of
the time savers.
You always have to compare thatwith the benefit that you're
actually getting.
Is it 1%, is it 2%?
Is it 10%?
Is it 100%?
I know we hate to really pinthings down.
If you do this you're going toget a 2% improvement in
performance, but can we justgeneralize a really fatiguing
(21:53):
mental task that's introducedinto an endurance task?
How much is that going toaffect that task overall?
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Yeah, Well, the answer is complicated, as you
knew it would be.
But if we look across thestudies and, like I said,
there's been over 70 of thesestudies now and if you wanted to
do a back of the envelope, andthe problem with the studies is
you've got, you know, you've gotelite athletes, you've got
people off the couch, you've gotpeople in between.
So it's of course theseinterventions are going to
(22:23):
affect them all differently whenit comes to their capacity to
work, but I think it's probablyon average I would be
comfortable saying a couple ofpercentage points, which is a
lot, especially for those folksat the pointy end.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Okay, and so it's actually like critically
important right here, right now,everybody can think about the
race that they're training for.
If you have a few percent marginbetween what you want to do and
what you think you can do atyour like, maximum capacity or
whatever, which is always alittle bit of a guessing game,
an intervention like this makesa lot of sense If you're looking
(22:57):
at, hey, I need to make 12%improvement or something like
that.
It needs to be something likethis plus something else, and so
that's what I mean by we haveto evaluate the cost of the
intervention in terms of theimpact that it actually, that it
actually has to have.
There's a lot of athletes outthere.
They just in terms of theimpact that it actually has to
have.
There's a lot of athletes outthere.
They just need to train more,because they're going to get
better overall if they just add10%, 20% more volume or better
(23:19):
training or whatever it is.
So it's important to know thatgoing into it, that we're not
going to make superheroes out ofathletes that aren't very good
in the first place.
You've got to have a goodathlete to start with, right.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Yeah, I like to tell people, if someone's talking to
you about double digitimprovements by doing anything
nutritional recovery, trainingyou probably should continue
looking, because this is not howthings work, you know.
It's interesting, though, jason,because if you look at, there's
a beautiful meta-analysis of abunch of studies that have
looked at the effects oftapering across a bunch of
different endurance sports soswimming, cycling, running,
(23:59):
rowing and on average, thebenefits of tapering are about
right around 2% according tothat meta-analysis, and, of
course, a lot of variables there.
Right, we're talking differentsports where the types of tapers
were different, but I thinkit's probably on par with that,
and I like to say to peoplewould you go to your A race
(24:19):
without tapering?
And everybody says no, right,of course they wouldn't.
So if you think that this couldbe on par with that, then maybe
we need to start having aserious conversation about are
there things we could do in kindof the spirit of mental fatigue
or brain fatigue, hygiene?
Are there changes we can makein your life right that are that
(24:41):
will leave you a little bitfresher?
And then, of course, thetrainability which we'll get
into okay.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
So this we're gonna, we're gonna go for the jugular
right now.
Now that we've set this up,this, this might seem I need to
come up with a less violentexample of how to set that up,
just as an afterthought.
Now you really have my interest.
All right, here we go.
So this might seem like acompletely biased perspective
here, but I'm going to ask youpoint blank Do you think that
(25:08):
it's trainable?
Speaker 2 (25:09):
I do, you know, and I'll tell you why.
So you know my background.
I was 30 plus years as acognitive neuroscience and
professor, ran a big lab focuseda lot on neuroimaging and image
performance.
That was my specialty, Got10,000 citations, all the
academic boxes checked.
I'm a skeptic and I saw thisresearch coming out on people
(25:32):
using brain endurance trainingand, if you want to call it that
, to try to develop fatigueresistance in these
performance-critical systems andoffset the effects that we've
been talking about.
That stuff's been coming out,let's say, for the last 15 or 20
years and I was super skepticalof it, but I watched it develop
and I watched the papersaccumulate to the point where I
(25:55):
needed to pay attention to itand take it seriously.
And I've been digging throughthat research and following that
research and pulling ittogether and I'm satisfied that
there's really something there,to the point where I work with a
small number of elite athletesOlympians, high level performers
and we've really committed todoing this training now as part
(26:19):
of their plans.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
So what does it look like?
Because everybody's going towant to know what like like.
Because when we talk aboutinterval interventions, people
want to know do I do the fourminute interval or the eight
minute interval, or?
the 32nd interval, what's theconstruction of it and things
like that.
Peel it, peel the curtain backand yeah, first off, I want the.
(26:40):
I'm going to step back just alittle bit before we get into it
.
I hope the listeners canappreciate because I certainly
can Somebody who is a leader intheir field, who ends up being
the ultimate skeptic ofsomething, turn their opinion
around based on both what theresearch was saying and then
also what they see in practice.
I think that's the ultimatetestament to there's something
there, not there's this onestudy about this one person,
(27:04):
this one case study here.
I heard this person tried this.
This is, like you said 30 yearsof experience and looking at
some of the initial researchwith a high, first off high IQ
of the domain that you are, thatyou've been working in, and
then ultimately coming aroundand saying you know what,
there's something here, and thenputting your kind of like, your
money where your mouth is, yourpractice, where your mouth is,
(27:25):
where you're actually doing thiswith athletes who hopefully
like where they're going to makea difference.
So just hope everybody canappreciate that.
That's just kind of a statementfor me, because I think when I
run into professionals that havean arc like that.
I always pay attention to it,so let's talk about what it
looks like.
What does it look like?
Speaker 2 (27:45):
Yeah.
So I think a nice way to talkabout this would be to just give
people an example of how itlooked in the lab and then how
it looks in practice lab andthen how it looks in practice,
or at least how it looks inpractice with my athletes, if
you don't mind.
Yeah, let's do it, we do that soyou know, one of my favorite
studies in this area and I thinkprobably it would be a
candidate for one of the mostnicely done studies is one by
(28:07):
Chris Ring's group at Birminghamand the first author, Stiano.
People can take a look at it.
Maybe we can put it in thenotes.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
I'll link it in the show notes.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Yeah, they have two studies.
I always love a scientificpaper that has the original
study and then they go and tryto replicate their own findings
in the same paper, and they didthat.
They had a group of controlsubjects who were undergoing the
same training program as theexperimental subjects.
These were experienced cyclists, they were like cat two, cat
(28:36):
three, road racers, and thedifference in sort of the
treatment was that, followingthese very structured cycling
workouts, which they did fourtimes a week for six weeks, the
experimental group would get,would undertake this demanding
cognitive task and this soundsreally hellacious like 30 to 45
minutes of the stroop task.
(28:58):
Okay, oh geez that's a lot to dothat, yeah, so explain explain
to the street test really quickimagine you're sitting there and
these words are flashing up onthe screen and the words are
color words.
They're like the word green orred or blue, and sometimes the
(29:19):
word green appears in green,let's say, and sometimes it
appears in orange, and your taskis to name the color of the
word but ignore what the wordactually says, right?
So when the word says the samething, it says green and it is
green.
That's very easy.
But when the word says blue andthe color is green, say of the
word blue, there's aninterference because our brain
(29:40):
automatically we're such goodreaders it automatically
activates the word blue, but ofcourse you're trying to name the
color, the ink that it'sprinted in or shown on your
screen.
You get a massive interferenceand this is like one of the most
widely used tasks in all ofexperimental psychology, because
the effects are so substantialand it causes you have to
(30:02):
inhibit that automatic responsein order to do it correctly.
So imagine doing that forgetting gassed on a set of
intervals, then coming back anddoing that for 30 to 45 minutes.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
It's pretty horrible, but they got people to do it I
would rather I would rather dococodona four times than do a
stroop test for 45 minutes,because just doing it for 60
seconds is just mind-numbing,like it's anyway, keep going
yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
So imagine these people are doing this for six
weeks.
At the end of the six weeks,they find that the group that
did the cycling training plusthe cognitive training gets a
bump in time to exhaustion whenthey're tested cycling at 80% or
65% of their critical power,compared to the group that just
(30:51):
did the cycling training andthen listened to neutral sounds.
I think that was the control.
So then they do the secondstudy, where they do the similar
manipulation, but the testingis different.
They have a 60-minutesubmaximal ramp test for cycling
and they show that improves,and so does the 20-minute time
(31:11):
trial performances of the peoplewho did the cognitive training
for six weeks, in addition tothe physical training, compared
to that control group.
But what doesn't improve is thefive-minute all-out power
effort.
This is really about trainingsomething that helps these more
(31:37):
sustained efforts.
Okay, which should be ofinterest to your audience.
Now, the reason I'm telling youthis about this study is to
answer your question about whatthis looks like in practice.
What it looks like for myathletes in practice is not what
it looks like in the study thatI just described.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
Okay, Thank God for your athletes.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Well, they don't leave, right, I mean, no one
would be able to sustain that.
And so what I've done is canstart to adjust the intensity of
that task, analogous to how youmight adjust the intensity of
(32:18):
intervals that a runner is doing.
There's a lot of variety of thestimulus.
Think about going to the gym.
Right, you go to the gym.
If you just do the same thingall the time, you're not going
to get the kind of adaptationsthat you want, because you would
adapt to the stimulus.
So they're progressive, thestimulus is varied, and what
we're trying to do here is driveneurophysiological adaptations,
(32:44):
neuroplasticity right, we hearthat word a lot what it really
is.
Increasing the strength of theconnections between neurons and
circuits, right, we're trying todrive these kind of adaptations
in these circuits to make themstronger and more efficient.
And the analogy to the muscle,I think, is reasonable here.
So my athletes are doing thesekind of wide variety of tasks.
(33:06):
We're progressing the intensityand we got it down to around
three sessions, 20 minutes a pop.
So inside of a week, usuallyafter their harder workouts,
they come in, get their wetclothes off, grab a bottle, sit
down and bang out these taskswhile they're still fatigued
(33:27):
from the workout that's thecritical point for about 20
minutes and I get greatcompliance on that because I
they're interested, they'remotivated, but they're also
getting a lot of stimulation, alot of variety, because they're
not just doing the same thingfor the whole time.
Speaker 3 (33:45):
Okay, and I found that, oh, go ahead.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
I just have a few questions before we kind of go
on here right yeah, so the tasksthat you're prescribing, are
they like problem solving typesof tasks Like I have to solve a
simple math problem or I have todo a maze or something like
that?
Or are they more visualmatching pieces, like all of the
Stroop tests?
Or is it kind of a battery of alot of different things?
(34:13):
You don't have to reveal thewhole thing, I'm just trying to
get a general sense of what thetask is.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
I'm happy to.
So yeah, so it's a greatquestion.
So I've kind of grouped thetasks.
They come out of my world ofcognitive neuroscience.
The tasks are tasks that havebeen used in that world and
research unrelated to athleticsover the years, and I have tasks
that are kind of grouped intodifferent categories depending
on which cognitive functionsthey put the most load on.
(34:37):
So the Stroop task puts a lotof load on inhibiting those
automatic responses and theStroop test is one of many tests
that we would use.
We have other tasks that arehaving you use focus attention
and look for a target among abunch of distractors, right, so
using your perception and yourfocused attention to identify a
(34:58):
target.
We have others where you mighthave a different kind of
stimulus, that is, let's say, wehave others where you might
have a different kind ofstimulus, that is, let's say, a
number, and you've got torespond differently if the
number is an even number, an oddnumber.
So we're getting you to makevery quick and rapid decisions
and you're under a lot of timepressure.
So generally I think of ourtasks as there's a group of them
(35:18):
that are focused more onperception and situational
awareness.
There's another group that'smore on attention, another on
rapid decision-making andinhibition of automatic
responses.
So response inhibition.
And then we have some othertasks that are really
emphasizing, like speededsensory motor responses.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
And it's always in a fatigued state.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
Yes, so if you look at the research, it started out
with them kind of interleavingtraining and these cognitive
tasks, which is great to do in alab but very impractical out in
the field.
So you go in the lab.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Just to describe this to the listeners and correct me
if I'm kind of butchering thisexplanation.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
If you're doing a 10K run every three or four
kilometers, you would dosomething, so you'd interrupt
your training to do the task orto do the brain training or
riding a stationary bike ordoing an interval, and then in
the recovery, doing things, andI sometimes, in certain
(36:23):
situations with my athletes,will, with a cyclist in
particular, interleave thesetasks with an interval workout.
It's trickier with runners.
There are ways to do it, butwhat we found, and what the
research has found, is thathaving these tasks done right
after physical training, whenpeople are still fatigued from
(36:44):
the physical training, seems toproduce very comparable effects.
So that's most convenient,generally speaking.
If we were to do them beforetraining, that can be a problem
because it can compromise, as wewere talking about the, the
actual training, but we don'twant to do that.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
So I was actually going to ask the like almost the
inverse of that question.
So, yeah, you understand thatif you did it beforehand you'd
potentially compromise thephysical training, which we
typically don't like to do.
There are certain situationswhere you'd want to do it, but
most of the time you're tryingto maximize the training.
But does it potentially have animpact on the recovery side of
things?
Because you know how thesethings go in arcs right First
(37:23):
it's the brain and then it'srecovery and then it's, you know
, some, you know like somethingelse and recovery is becoming,
you know it kind of always hasbeen, but it's always been a
little bit of a hot topic.
We're trying to maximizeeverything we're doing to.
There are some athletes and Iknow and I do know a lot of
high-level coaches in a lot ofsports that adhere to this where
they insist on a wind-downperiod right after the activity.
(37:46):
So take three to five minutes,decompress, get into a state to
where you're optimized forrecovery and adaptation.
Could this potentiallyinterfere with that or do you
have a way around it?
Speaker 2 (38:00):
Yeah.
So I think it's a really goodpoint and I'll and I have two
answers for you.
One we know that mental fatigueaffects vis-a-vis the brain.
It affects the autonomicnervous system.
We can see effects of mentalfatigue on heart rate
variability, right that areanalogous to the effects we see
in athletes from hard training.
So that's something we need tothink about, right.
(38:23):
But with my athletes, theprotocol that I found best for
them is that we get them startedon this within 30 minutes of
training.
And I chose 30 minutes notrandomly, but because the
research.
When we look at performance oncognitive tasks after athletes
have done hard exertions, it'sabout a half an hour before
(38:45):
performance comes back up tonormal, depending, of course, on
the duration of the physicaloutput and so on.
But that 30-minute window, Ithink, is a critical time to get
them started on these tasks.
So come in, get dry clothes on,grab a bottle, start
rehydrating and replenishingyour glycogen and then sit down
(39:06):
and bang these out.
So it's not a matter of youknow, you're dripping sweat all
over your iPhone and you'retrying to get it done without
destroying the device and you'rebonking your brains out and all
that stuff.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
The sensitivity between the end of the workout
and when you start.
This, it seems to be seems toallow for a little bit of
physical recovery, it seems to,and you know this is.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
You raise great points.
I mean we just don't have theresearch that's looked at, all
these different factors, as inso many domains, right, what is
the optimal amount of time interms of task placement and so
forth?
I'm telling you now, guided bythe research but also
experimenting in practice withmyself and my athletes, what I'm
(39:51):
finding has been working for us.
So I think that minimumeffective dose that we're
finding with these eliteathletes is about about an hour
a week broken up into threesessions high intensity sessions
, but about 18 to 20 minutes persession piggybacked on at the
end of either a high intensityworkout or a big over distance
(40:15):
workout, when people arecarrying okay, I wanted to take
another quick break in theaction and bring back coach Adam
to talk about this from areally practical point of view,
on how we actually handle thisas coaches.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
So first off, adam, do you have any athletes that
you're actually doing this withand, if so, what are you
actually doing?
And if not, why wouldn't you bedoing them with that?
Why wouldn't you be doing thiswith them?
Speaker 3 (40:40):
So the answer is no.
I do not do this with anyone.
I think there are use casesthat I'm interested in and I'll
be happy to take, say, 30% ofthe credit of just you know.
Maybe I should be, but I thinkmost of it is that a lot of
people aren't necessarily a goodcandidate for it.
And those good candidates mightbe, say, an elite athlete,
(41:02):
where a couple of percentagepoints matter, or someone who
has tackled so much of the restof things that this is now a
worthwhile place to look for animprovement.
But quite honestly, for thehost of my athletes, I think we
have more to gain elsewhere.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
And that's what a lot of athletes are kind of
wrestling around in their mindsright now.
To conjure up that image iswhat am I going to get?
Is this actually worth it?
And I think your point is welltaken, where you know Scott's
working with a handful of eliteathletes on this.
I have some athletes that aregood candidates for this, but
I'm still in your boat whereit's hard to fit the criteria to
(41:42):
actually to have an athletethat is actually ready for it,
and then you actually have tohave the practitioner that can
deploy it.
You know people like Scott andother.
You know another mentalperformance specialists out
there.
They are few and far in betweenand much fewer and further in
between than a sportspsychologist or some or
something of that nature,because this is a specialized
(42:03):
intervention within a, within aspecialty provider.
So the access alone kind ofmakes it a little bit, kind of
kind of makes it a little bitproblematic for a lot of
athletes.
But then you're absolutelyright that that many athletes
they can do more miles, theycould just get more fit, fit,
and that's going to be the bulkof their improvement.
So while the all of this isintriguing and I certainly think
(42:25):
that we absolutely need to payattention to it and use this
intervention.
With certain athletes, there'sa whole range of things that
that that make it eitherincompatible with the athlete's
lifestyle or something wherethey're just not a good
candidate for it.
Speaker 3 (42:37):
Yeah, I think for the time being, I definitely lean
towards avoiding the negativeconsequences of what some of
what you and Scott talk about,rather than proactively training
our ability to handle it.
Speaker 1 (42:51):
Okay, so twofold question.
Well, first off, go over.
Let's just review theintervention dose in terms of
frequency per week and number ofweeks that you need to see some
sort of reasonable improvementagain yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
And well, there's another good question.
Okay, if we look at theresearch that's out there, there
haven't been that many extendedtraining studies.
The one I mentioned to you fromchris ring's group is my
favorite because it did sixweeks of training right, four
times a week.
My athletes are doing thisstuff in a kind of periodized
way, like they do their normaltraining plan.
(43:25):
So we've got like a pre, we'vegot a base phase, a
pre-competitive phase and acompetitive phase that we kind
of rotate through.
And you know they're working onthis in parallel with their
training.
Yes, they take a training break, they take time off the bike,
they take time off of running.
If they're triathletes, theytake a break as well, but we get
(43:45):
back into it just like they dowith their training plan.
So we're kind of doing our ownreal world extended programs of
this that are spanning.
You know, in the longest case Iguess we're up to six months
with some of my athletes, andyou know.
One other point I want to makeis that and I think this is a
really important one I'mconstantly monitoring levels of
(44:06):
fatigue in the central nervoussystem, and so I want to just
tell you how I'm doing that.
It's super simple and relatedto what we've been talking about
, but I don't think there's agreat replacement for asking
people how they feel.
I think it's super important toknow a person's subjective
state, but I think we can dobetter.
There's more we can know andthere's something quantitative
(44:27):
and not subjective, moreobjective, that we can be doing.
And if you look at the researchon mental fatigue not in
athletics but in cognition andpeople have been studying mental
fatigue, cognitive fatigue,brain fatigue, in workplace
environments, in militaryenvironments for a long time you
can use response times insimple tasks like we're talking
(44:48):
about and show that you knowwhen people are fatigued, their
responses on average get slower,they become less accurate and
more variable, and thatvariability is a really
important point.
So in every training sessionwith my athletes they do a
three-minute task.
It's dead simple, boring ashell.
(45:09):
Visual stimulus comes on thescreen.
They just have to respond to itas quickly as they can.
It doesn't come on rhythmicallyso they've got to think a
little bit, but it's just quick.
It's measuring the time ittakes to perceive something
visually and pass that throughthe sensory parts of the brain
to the motor system in the brainand then send the command down
the spinal cord and that's a wayof getting a quantitative
(45:32):
measure of the amount of fatiguean athlete is carrying in that
central nervous system as webuild up a profile for that
individual over time.
It's not something.
Oh, look, you took the test,you've got an A, a, b, a, c.
We've got to look at the overtime.
You know I get three of thesesessions a week from these
people.
They're doing months.
I can start to see the patterns.
(45:53):
I can start to see, oh, they'rein a heavy period of stress
right now.
It may be you know you havesomebody and you know they're
going through an illness,they're going through an injury,
they're just got done with theyou know 250 mile race or
whatever it is.
I see that in and we adjust.
We're constantly adjusting andtitrating their load, just like
(46:14):
a good coach would do in anytraining.
Speaker 1 (46:16):
And when you're doing this, is it being deployed on
an iPad?
Because I know a lot of peoplewill think of the visual
stimulus with something like theBlaze pods or any of the other.
I can't, I'm failing toremember some of the other
companies out there that producethese, but the little LED
things that light up that youwill actually touch, you can put
them wherever.
Yeah, yeah, like, how are thetests actually being deployed?
Speaker 2 (46:37):
Yeah, so back in my lab days we spent a lot of time
writing code and programmingthings, and fortunately I've
partnered with a company nowthat actually provides software
that I can use to customconfigure tasks and push them
out to people's iPhone or iPad,and so the way it looks for my
athletes is they'll get theirweek of plans right and I'll get
(47:00):
their data back and I canconstantly be adjusting in the
background and titrating whatthey're getting and deciding
when to progress, the intensity,when to back things down, and
so forth.
But yes, they're doing these oneither an iPhone or Okay.
Speaker 1 (47:13):
So here's the half a zillion dollar question, and
then the zillion dollar question, afterwards the half a zillion
dollar question is so, withinthe task, you're obviously
monitoring this.
Do you see improvement withinthe task, just like we would see
you know if you're titratingthe intensity up, we would look
at the, we would look atintervals and, okay, the
intervals are getting better,worse or staying the same.
(47:33):
That's the first part of it.
But the zillion dollar one, orthe quadrillion zillion dollar
one, is can?
What are the actual athletesactually saying about their
performance, and can you trackanything from a performance side
of things?
Speaker 2 (47:46):
Yeah, so the first question is that, yes, just like
any training stimulus, peoplestart to adapt and they get
better.
Right, they start out.
It's like whoa.
This is really difficult, andthat's why we need to keep
progressing the intensity ofthat stimulus, just like you do
with your athletes and theirtraining programs, and so that
that's something we'reconstantly doing.
(48:06):
And, as you know, with any kindof training it's non-linear,
right, it's not like every weekbuilds on the next it's just you
know, going off into infinity.
Um, there are ups, there aredowns and so forth, and that's
where the hand tuning and thingscome in.
And I've got some nice software.
Is an amazing thing.
We can do such such intricatethings.
(48:27):
We can set thresholds wherepeople have the task actually
start to adjust in difficultyaccording to their performance.
Hold them kind of like ridingyour bike on a trainer in erg
mode.
Think about it like that.
For the bring.
There's just a lot of nicestuff we can do to progress
things and keep people workinghard and driving those
adaptations throughneuroplasticity.
(48:47):
The second thing is anecdotal,right.
So I cap my one-on-one work withelite athletes at 12 because I
give them my heart and soul in asense right.
We're engaged in a lot ofcommunication.
This is only a part of what Ido with these athletes.
We work a lot on all the othersorts of mental and brain and
(49:11):
psychological skills to supporttheir performance.
This kind of, I would say,synergistic training is
something we do, but it's by nomeans all we do.
And what I see coming back fromthe athletes, their self-report,
is that they feel like they'regetting deeper into their races
and having more mental clarityand being able to be clearer
(49:32):
about decision and alsoexperiencing these slight
decreases in perceived exertionfor fixed efforts, which I think
is super interesting.
My athletes are very bright butthey're not spending their time
reading this research.
They're full-time athletes,they're busy, they have a lot
going on, but these are the kindof reports that I would expect
(49:56):
if we were starting to see someof the effects that the research
is claiming.
So I find it very encouragingwe're getting on podiums Now.
That's very hard to connect.
Speaker 1 (50:07):
Yeah, I mean, they're great athletes.
Speaker 2 (50:12):
They get on podium right, but their self-report is
that they're also feeling likethey can go a bit deeper and
feel fresher to make the kind ofcritical decisions they need to
make to be competitive I meanhere's deepened.
Speaker 1 (50:27):
Here's how I view any of these like interventions,
right, if you have a mecca, ifyou have some sort of plausible
mechanism of action, that's thefirst step.
And then you have research thattests that plausible mechanism
of action and that goes in thesame direction as the mechanism,
as the proposed mechanism does.
That's the second step.
(50:48):
Then you have really smartpeople start to deploy this with
athletes and military personneland emergency response
personnel and things like that.
That's the next step.
That goes in the same directionas what the researchers
indicate is what the mechanismof action would indicate.
And then, when you have theathletes saying the exact same
thing that the research says,that the smart people say that
(51:11):
the mechanism says, if all ofthose direction arrows are kind
of like lining up in terms of,yeah, the effect should look
like this, then you havesomething that you can actually
like, really, really latch onto,because, for better, for worse,
performance is always theultimate outcome that we're
always chasing.
(51:31):
And I say for better because ifyou can test an intervention
and their performance getsbetter, there's absolutely
something there.
Most of the times there'sabsolutely something there now,
because performance ismultifactorial, you have to
realize that there are alwaysother things that go into it,
and you can never chalk up apodium to oh my gosh, it's all
of a sudden brain endurancetraining.
(51:51):
Or oh my gosh, it's all of asudden it's the supplement.
Or oh my gosh, all of a sudden,it's the shoe choice.
Right, it's what we've kind oflike latched onto our equipment
choice, and so, for better orfor worse, we're always chasing
that performance piece, and sowhen you are looking at the
performance piece, I do thinkyou have to have the other
directional arrows kind of analignment as well before kind of
taking it under like seriousconsideration to do, because
(52:12):
otherwise you're going to chasearound too many things oh,
absolutely, and there willalways be every study, that of
every uh clinical study rightthat we could think of for
medications and this and thatand the other.
Speaker 2 (52:24):
They're always responders and they're
non-responders.
And why people some peoplerespond better than others are
the great mysteries of the world, and it's certainly true for
training and certainly true forthe stuff we're talking about.
But we have we didn't get intoit much here, but but we have
some reasonable ideas andmechanisms.
There is a fatigue network inthe brain.
(52:44):
There are a bunch ofinterconnected areas in the
brain that we can see infunctional magnetic resonance
imaging that are affected whenwe put people under fatiguing
cognitive loads.
And it just so happens thatthere's a lot of overlap in
terms of the areas in thatnetwork and the areas that are
involved in computing perceivedeffort and perceived exertion.
(53:04):
And what I think is that thatis the mechanism by which brain
fatigue gets translated intochanges in performance.
It's an effect that comesthrough our sense of perceived
effort, perceived exertion andkind of lowers the ceiling a
little bit on how deep we'reable to go our functional
(53:26):
capacity on any given day,because you've got a
physiological cap right.
There's the ultimate thing thatif you go beyond it, there's
utter collapse, but we're neverthere.
The brain is putting the brakeson before we get there, for
good reason.
That ceiling the brain sets isthe functional capacity, and if
we can get a little bit betterfunctional capacity, that's when
(53:49):
we have the breakthrough.
So that's what we're working on.
Speaker 1 (53:51):
So an athlete wants to go through this and I think
it's worth mentioning.
You glazed over this.
This is one of the tools inyour arsenal that you're
deploying with athletes.
Right, just like field.
Two max intervals is one of thetools in my arsenal that I
would deploy from a programmingstandpoint with athletes is just
one one thing.
So don't like, stop everythingelse you're doing and do brain
(54:14):
endurance training just, but ifyou're considering it, so option
a is hire you right, you'recapped.
You're capped at 12.
And, as is the case with everypractitioner right, Including
myself, we have functional capswith athletes that we can only
work with so many.
But athletes want, like aresource so absent that like
working with you directly, likehow would an athlete DIY this
(54:35):
for themselves?
Speaker 2 (54:36):
Yeah, I think it's a great question and I think it's
a tricky one, and I'll tell youwhy.
Because all the things thatwe've been talking about, I
think there are a lot ofelements that go into making
this work, like with most kindsof training, this progressive
intensity, like a lot of variety, to keep people attentionally
engaged and willing to complywith these tasks.
(54:57):
It's tough DIYing it.
I think you know there aredefinitely apps out there where
you can get the Stroop test, forexample, and kind of bang away
on this, but it's one of thosethings that I think is somewhat
analogous to.
You know, you can get chat, gptto make a training program for
you, right, but it's not goingto be the same kind of
(55:21):
experience that you have whenand I don't think you can
reasonably expect the same kindof performance changes that you
would get if you hired you to,you know, coach them.
So it's tough, right.
I think the basic conceptstands, though we want to
combine physical load and mentalload to try to get at this
(55:41):
synergistic effect onperformance, and so that's the
key bit.
Now, you're right, I don'tthink this is a standalone thing
, any more than I think, likeyour example, that VO2 max
intervals are a standalone thing.
You got to be doing all theother stuff, and I think this
works best.
I've yet to have an athlete,jason, come to me just for this.
(56:03):
That wouldn't work.
That's not how I work.
Everything else has to be inplace, right.
The athlete has to be doing thephysical training.
They have to be doing thenutrition, doing the recovery.
All of those boxes need to bechecked.
What we're talking about hereis something more on top of that
for the person who's looking totake it to the next level, for
(56:26):
the person who's going toaltitude to get those bonuses
you can think of.
This is kind of something likethat.
Right, you don't go to altitudeif you're not doing all the
things that we just talked aboutfirst.
Speaker 1 (56:37):
right I'd be remiss if I didn't like at least ask
the question on how to hack ittogether, because ultra runners
are kind of like notorious.
They're notorious for doing that.
I always think of the saunatraining that the Badwater
athletes would do, where theyroll the treadmill into a sauna,
and I can see the analog tothat in this case being like
doing their teenagerstrigonometry homework after
(57:00):
they've done an interval session, or something like that.
But what you're trying to sayis it's like, in order to do it
correctly, in order to get theright progressive overload term,
that we would use trainingright To create an adaptation.
It you can't just you can'tjust wing it right.
It's got to be done in anintelligent fashion.
Speaker 2 (57:17):
I think so, you know, and I'm a real DIY guy myself.
So I like the idea of like,let's figure out how we can do
this ourselves, and I wouldnever discourage people from
trying that.
I mean, if you can find somecognitively demanding, loading
tasks to do, I would say try,try 20 minutes of it.
(57:37):
It's got to be intense, you'vegot to find ways of having
variety to the stimulus andprogress, the intensity.
But if you can figure out howto do that, I'm a little bit at
a loss to think how to do thatOnce I convinced myself that
there was really something here,then the question became how
can I make this work?
I didn't want to go back to thedays of the lab where I had
(57:58):
programmers and we were kind ofhacking this stuff together and
then figuring out, let alonefiguring out, how to push it out
to people.
Yeah, I'm not intentionallytrying to hold out on people or
anything.
I just think that we've talkedabout some of the key parameters
that I think come out of theresearch but also come out of
the art of applying this kind ofstuff.
People could use thoseguidelines and go out and try to
(58:20):
try something, why not?
I don't think there's harm todoing it.
I don't think there's a side,you know, risky side effects or
something like that, and that'sa nice thing about this.
Speaker 1 (58:29):
Yeah, the cost that I was talking about earlier,
right To set up this whole valueproposition.
The realistic cost is time,right, and then maybe
potentially a little bit ofrecovery, if you really wanted
to like tease that apart.
But you try to mitigate that asmuch as possible and I think,
the interventions where youreally can get a little bit of
free time and I always rememberthis really famous quote by John
(58:53):
Cobb back in the early days ofall of the aerodynamic stuff.
And for anybody that's over 40years old, scott, help me out to
call out John, anybody that'sover 40 years old, scott, helped
me out to call out john wellover 40.
Speaker 3 (59:04):
Yeah, but you'd have to be sorry, 60.
Speaker 1 (59:07):
You'd have to be over 40 to recognize who john like
john cobb's influence onaerodynamics cycling he has this
really great quote.
He's like at a certain point youjust got to buy your speed,
meaning everybody's just as fast.
You kind of just buy the bestcomponents and the best aero
wheels and the best aero barsand things like that.
And what his point with that isis the cost to it is literally
(59:30):
an economic cost to theperformance improvement.
Here the cost of this is a timecost and not an energetic cost
or a risk of injury cost like wetalk about with training, load
increases and things like thatyeah, I think so, and I I am
interested in the possibility ofdeveloping, like, a group-based
way of going through this thatcould accommodate more people.
Speaker 2 (59:53):
I think, though the point stands, that this is
something that could serveathletes well who are already
doing the other stuff, and Ithink with the John Cobb stuff
too, you know, if you're notdoing the training, getting an
aero helmet and aero socks isprobably not going to make is
make the lion's share of thedifference for you.
(01:00:13):
You need to ride your bike moreA hundred percent.
Speaker 1 (01:00:16):
All right, Scott, we're gonna let you go.
This is awesome, as always.
Speaker 3 (01:00:19):
appreciate these conversations with you.
Speaker 1 (01:00:28):
A lot of those and I'm always appreciative of
people who kind of like blazethe trail and, at the same time,
make a positive impact inathletes' lives and careers
careers.
I'm going to link up a lot ofthe things that we talked about
in the show notes, but where canpeople get to know you a little
bit better in some of the workthat you're doing, whether it's
a website, social media, stufflike that?
Speaker 2 (01:00:47):
Well, thank you for your kind comments.
It means a lot to me.
I am at cerebralperformancecom,which is my business, and I try
to keep a lot of content onthere about the science and also
what we're doing, and peoplecan learn a little bit more
about my background there, orthey and people have questions
or thoughts.
They're really welcome to justshoot me an email.
(01:01:08):
I'm scott at cerebralperformancecom, so nice and
simple.
Speaker 1 (01:01:12):
I love to hear from people and pick ideas around
thank you again for your timeI'm always amazed at people who
give out their personal emailaddresses and phone numbers on
this podcast.
We'll have to follow up and seehow many people take you up on
that.
Speaker 2 (01:01:24):
I'm not giving you my phone number man.
Speaker 1 (01:01:26):
All right, there we go.
All right, I'm sure we'll haveyou back on the podcast at some
point, but, man, thank you fromthe bottom of my heart.
This has been amazing.
It is every conversation thatwe've had.
Speaker 2 (01:01:34):
Well, thank you, I agree.
Speaker 1 (01:01:41):
It's always good to see you, Jason.
I love our chat.
All right, folks, there youhave it.
There you go.
Much thanks to Scott for comingback on the podcast for his
third trip.
I always appreciate ourconversations.
As you guys can tell, wheneveryou talk to one of these people
who is a true pioneer, a trueleader in the field, they can
always articulate what they'retrying to do and what the
benefits might be for athletes,for the things that they are
(01:02:02):
actually doing with them inorder to improve performance.
Appreciate the heck out of eachand every one of you listeners.
As always, this podcast isnothing without you.
This podcast is always broughtto you sponsorship and
advertisement free.
That has been my commitment toyou, the audience, ever since
the inception of this podcast.
I can't even remember how manyepisodes we've done.
(01:02:23):
Right now, If you want tosupport this podcast, you have
two great ways that you can doit.
The first way is you cansubscribe to our research
newsletter, Research Essentialsfor Ultra Running, where we take
topics like this and we breakthem down in depth and we
present our take on them in justplain old English so anybody
(01:02:44):
can understand them.
And you can also subscribe orbecome a USCA certified
ultramarathon coach.
I partnered with USCA severalyears ago to create coaching
content all around how to becomea better ultramarathon coach
and how to train for ultramarathons, realizing that there
(01:03:07):
was kind of a void ofinformation in this particular
area.
Links to both of those will bein the show notes.
If you want to support thispodcast once again, all you have
to do is subscribe to ResearchEssentials for Ultra Running.
Or if you want to level up yourknowledge game, whether you're
a coach or an athlete, check outthat USCA coach certification.
All right, folks.
That is it for today and, asalways, we will see you out on
the trails.
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