We’re joined by neuroscientist Dr. Scott Frey as we explore the effects of mental fatigue and brain endurance training on performance.
Episode Transcript
Chris Case 00:00
Hey, everyone, welcome to another episode of fast talk. Your source for the science of endurance performance. I’m your host, Chris case here with Grant holikey and Dr Griffin McMath, recent advances in Brain and Cognitive Science are challenging the neck down philosophy and opening a new frontier for those seeking to optimize performance. This work is driven by a host of observations, demonstrating that the brain is applying the brakes on performance well in advance of reaching true physiological barriers. In today’s episode, we’ll explore the role of mental fatigue on performance and the synergistic effects of combining brain and physical training, a growing body of evidence indicates that this quote, unquote, brain endurance training, or B, E, T, sometimes called synergistic training, drives adaptations that can significantly improve performance over physical training alone, with the help of neuroscientist Dr Scott fry, founder of cerebral performance, we’ll discuss why combining cognitive and physical training yields these synergistic effects by way of central nervous system adaptations within brain areas that compute perceptions of effort and exertion. We’ll discuss how these adaptations are manifested as recalibrations that enable going a bit closer to our physical limits and greater fatigue resistance in performance critical cognitive functions. We’ll also explore why many people underestimate the impact of training and other life demands on the central nervous system. And finally, we’ll detail how to put these principles into practice by periodizing this brain training to reflect the demands of our training and racing, speaking of which those demands of training and racing Griffin are immense leading into the last few weeks of a key event, and athletes and coaches need to deal with those demands in different ways,
Griffin McMath 01:51
very differently. I mean, the athlete has one goal. It’s performing. It’s focusing on that. And it’s not just about making sure that their body is ready, or that they’re hitting a certain time, their brain, as we’re talking about in this episode, needs to have that burden, that cognitive load, reduced. So what does that actually look like when it comes to applications or tools? Because we can talk theory all day long, but what tools actually exist today that can allow that difference? Yeah,
Chris Case 02:20
I think the best tool for the job in this instance is training peaks. And I say that because of the ability for athlete and or coach to self select what they really take from it at any given moment, a coach has all the tools in the world at their fingertips if they so choose data and data and data and processes and tools to analyze it. The athlete, on the other hand, in those last few days leading up to event or week, needs to back away from some of that data. And for instance, the color coding of whether they hit a target workout or not, green, yellow, red is so simple, so easy. And if that’s all they have to pay attention to leading up to it, then, fantastic. Fantastic, exactly. So training peaks is a great tool for that. So
Griffin McMath 03:06
if coaches want to get started with this, is there a free trial? Where can they find it? Absolutely, there is a free trial. Start it at trainingpeaks.com/fasttalk, great. We’ll see you on training peaks. All right,it’s time to train your brain. Let’s make you fast. Dr fry, welcome backto fast talk.
Scott Frey 03:23
Well, it’s really nice to see you all. Thanks for having meas
Chris Case 03:26
a neuroscientist who has spent a lot of time in the academic world and who has moved beyond that world, you’re starting to explore what some people might think are the fringes of performance, if you will. But for you, it’s not the fringe at all. This is we’re talking about the brain. We’re talking about its effect on training today, and you have basically coined a new term, synergistic training. Do you want to give us the 32nd overview of what that means?
Scott Frey 03:58
Yeah, so, from my perspective, as a career brain scientist and athlete, I’ve been a bit frustrated by the fact that most sports science really takes the perspective of focusing on everything from the neck down. But of course, the brain is the command and control center for all of our behavior, performance notwithstanding, and so when I decided to leave academia and start cerebral performance, where I’m working with elite athletes, we’re really trying to take some of the great things that I’ve seen and some of which came out of my own lab in cognitive neuroscience, and figure out ways to apply them to improve performance. And so I thought that it would be very interesting for us today to talk about some of the things that I think are actionable for athletes who want to start considering how their brain might be influencing their performance.
Chris Case 04:56
This makes me think of and. But we’re going to get there with a little bit more explanation. But are we talking about Nokes idea of central Governor here, or is this something else entirely?
Scott Frey 05:08
Yeah, I’m a bit agnostic about putting that label on it, but I think at a high conceptual level, Nokes idea is a good one, and I think there’s plenty of data to support the idea that we have a physical capacity, and all of the kind of work that you associate with most sports science is trying to improve that through training over time. And we have ideas about how to structure workouts and periodize workouts and progress workouts and so on, in order to develop cardiovascular fitness, to develop neuromuscular fitness, metabolic systems and so forth. But what Nokes and others, including myself, are arguing for is this idea that there’s also functional capacity. So you can work on your physical capacity, but on a day to day basis, there is the brain kind of setting the limit about how close to that physical capacity or your true physiological breaking point, you’re going to be able to go and I think most coaches and athletes really know that intuitively, and it’s largely the reason that our performances can fluctuate day to day so wildly, even when we’re competing under very similar conditions.
Grant Holicky 06:19
So I think one of the things that most of our audience will be pretty aware of is the in this is the idea a little bit behind FTP right functional threshold power then on any given day, due to fatigue, due to those things that may be lower. But one of the things you’re really bringing into the conversation here too, is off the bike, outside of the physical performance realm. What is the cognitive load and what may somebody doing outside training that also may be hindering what they’re able to do on the bike that day? That functional performance doesn’t just have to do with fatigue in the legs. It may have to do with fatigue in the brain too.
Scott Frey 07:00
Yeah, you bring up a really good point. And I think this be nice if we could take some time to talk a little bit about what I would call central fatigue. So fatigue in the central nervous system grant, there have been now over 70 peer reviewed published papers where people have deliberately induced cognitive load on people had them do demanding tasks and then evaluate their ability to perform physically on things like cycling ergometers or other kinds of instruments where we could really measure physical output.
Chris Case 07:31
Sorry, to interrupt. But what types of things are people doing to increase that cognitive load?
Scott Frey 07:36
Yeah. So in the lab context, you might have someone do a very demanding cognitive task, like a computerized task that requires them to make rapid decisions or to inhibit automatic responses, something that really puts a lot of intense demands on cognitive performance in the moment. And a lot of times, those tasks are quite artificial, but they’re very effective in providing that kind of load on your central nervous system, and particularly the brain. And I think the more practical thing is that to realize that when we look at athletes, and there have been a large number of these studies that have looked at athletes, and what you can show by measuring cognitive performance using similar kinds of tasks that we might use to induce cognitive load. You can look at accuracy, and you can look at speed and so forth. And what you find is that training, intense training, the kind of training that your listeners do, the kind that we do, actually has both acute and chronic effects on cognitive performance. So some of you can probably relate to this. Right after hard training, you’re probably not at your best. But what many of us don’t realize, and I think it’s because we’re not really wired to see things in terms of like over the long haul, but when we’re training really hard, cognitive performance, and we can demonstrate this quantitatively, starts to decay. And so this notion about being aware of fatigue in the central nervous system and its potential impact on performance, I think, is something that is very important, largely overlooked in sports science and by athletes and coaches, and also something that we are coming to understand we can do things about.
Griffin McMath 09:25
I think this is so interesting, because the way that we’re describing this, I can’t help but think of like a motorcycle and the governor, and that you think about what the bike is actually capable of, and then the governor is there to regulate the speed. And then people, you know, take that Governor off, to really go for it. And I feel like this training is that ability to say, don’t be limited. The bike can actually go way more than what you think it can do. And that vehicle is our body, but it seems so separate the way you talk about it, neck down. So we have this physical store of energy, and then we have this mental store. So. How are you differentiating? Yeah,
Scott Frey 10:02
I think that separation is really an artifice, and it gets into the traditions of different disciplines, brain scientists not really interacting with exercise scientists for the most part, and exercise scientists not really interacting with the brain scientists. But we’re talking about whole organisms here, right? You know, if people doubt the idea that the brain might be what’s putting the limit on performance, we could talk about a bunch of research where people have manipulated that limiter, that ceiling, a functional capacity with things like psychostimulants, caffeine, methylphenidate, other drugs that only impact the brain, and showing that, including cyclists, can exceed their known maximum power output. For example, when they’re given these drugs that only act on the brain. So these aren’t affecting the muscles. These aren’t affecting the spinal cord. They’re not changing anything cardiovascularly or metabolically. And another thing that works deception. If you have an athlete do a maximal Time Trial effort, and then you have them race their former self, but unbeknownst to them, you adjust up the speed at which they’re seeing that target go, or you give them false feedback indicating that they’re actually underperforming, you can get about another 2% out of fairly well trained athletes, right? And of course, that’s going to be less in people who are really, really at the pointy end of things. But the point is that there’s solid evidence coming from a number of different directions that the brain is what’s constantly and dynamically adjusting how deep we’re going to be able to go on any one day.
Griffin McMath 11:47
So coaches, if you’re listening, this isn’t the green light to start lying to your athletes, of course.
Grant Holicky 11:53
No, it works both ways,
Scott Frey 11:54
or giving them methylphenidate.
Grant Holicky 11:57
Small, small things. I want
Chris Case 11:59
to hear more from you, though, Grant about, like, deception in your athletes. Do you ever I have? Yeah, yeah, I have. You might call that, like a lame person, would say reverse psychology or something like,
Grant Holicky 12:10
yeah. It’s interesting. So much of what Scott talks about the applications of it to an athlete in terms of mental strength and mental performance, how we put those into play, but you you have to know the athlete very, very well, because you have some athletes that are going to do wonderfully when you tell them you’re behind, right? To catch up. And then you have other athletes where it’s just all got to be
Chris Case 12:35
positive, no matter what, yeah, that might crush them and they might slow down, right? Yeah.
Grant Holicky 12:39
Really interesting way to look at this is in the pool, we have the mile, and the mile is the 1600 in the pool. It’s 66 lengths in a short course pool, and the only indication they have of their pace is the lap counter. So we put a card in the pool that tells them how many laps they have to go. So there’s all these things that we used to use to say you’re off pace. You’re on pace, your speed up, slow down. Any of those same
Chris Case 13:05
with the track run. I did my hour attempt Nick League, and was there as my Pacer, and he’d work, you know, like up down, or he’d be in front of the finish line or behind the finish line based on whether I was up or down. But after the fact, I learned that they were standing in places that were not accurate to the absolutely, you know, like
Grant Holicky 13:23
Absolutely. So there’s athletes that I would never shake the card up and down, which means speed up in the first half of a race. There were athletes that I do it the third 50 of the whole thing. And we always had a plan of this means slow down. I don’t think I ever had waving, waving it back and forth. This means slow down. I don’t think I ever did that with an athlete. Ever. When they went out too fast, you’re like, Okay, we made the bed. Let’s lay. You’re on it. You’re on it. Everything’s great. And then that’s always thrown into a mess by the athletes that would look at the clock while they
Scott Frey 13:58
and of course, that’s a bit of a one trick pony, right, right? You can’t pull that card out too often, or the athlete’s gonna know, oh, he’s lying to me.
Grant Holicky 14:06
And I think one of the most important pieces as you go forward is, how does the athlete understand this themselves? That’s what puts it into practice for the long term. Because otherwise you’re reliant on a secondary individual, sometimes a tertiary individual. And this is the thing that is never talked about. We’re starting to talk about cognitive load. But what about the cognitive load on that secondary individual, that tertiary individual? How are they performing in that moment? How are they reacting? So putting that faith and that trust blindly in that person brings a whole nother layer of the mental performance. And we talk a lot about mental performance of coaches. How do you control your emotion in this atmosphere in order to be able to perform as well? So so much of what this is about, I think, just continues to boil down to something, as you’ve noted with 75 studies out there. And. These are fairly recent studies. People have not been on this for very long. There is so much evidence that we are massively ignoring in endurance sports of how central nervous system and brain are influencing performance through things that we have never even considered before.
Chris Case 15:19
Let’s hear from former World Tour professional cyclist Brent buchwalter, who is now heavily involved in sports psychology and mental training. On the power of this concept of brain endurance training,
Brent Bookwalter 15:31
I think this idea of brain endurance training, the idea the actual execution, all extremely interesting, promising, and really, for a lot of individuals, effective ways to get another little boost in performance. And consider like this larger approach to our training, and that it’s not just physiological. There is this cognitive, emotional and Scott’s expertise, this neuroscience level of basis for performance as well. So in my career, I didn’t do really any of this training. During my career for performance, I did some of this as like a concussion recovery, like concussion baseline testing, concussion recovery as I was coming back from traumatic brain injury episode. But yeah, I think talking to Scott, learning from him also that the latest research in the science of brain endurance training has really evolved the past few years. And from what I read as a no expert in that field, it is really promising now. And if I was still racing professionally, this would definitely be an area I was hitting. And even if I was competing recreationally, and I felt like, yeah, I wanted to turn over a couple stones that I have left unturned. I think it’s a very worthy and exciting place to put some resources and investment and intention. I think it’s the next frontier of performance, and it’s not the same thing in what I’m doing with the mental performance coaching and the sports psychology path, but it’s intertwined together, at least sits next to each other and goes in parallel, if not connected and intertwined together. So there’s a lot of potential and application and performance enhancement and wellness that lies with that new, exciting field of brain endurance training.
Chris Case 17:06
Scott, do you want to go a little bit deeper into some of the findings and really send that point home that grant just
Scott Frey 17:12
made? I’d love to so grant. You’ll be interested to know that over 100 years ago, an Italian scientist named Mosa did these very cool studies where he looked at his professor colleagues during the time when they were had a major workload, like at the end of the term, when they were examining their students and so forth in his lab in Italy, and had them lifting a little weight with their fingers, where he could quantify time to exhaustion. Really simple system, and he showed cognitive fatigue lowered their physical capacity to do work, and then that kind of got lost, right? And what’s happening now is so often happens in science, there’s a rediscovery, and people now have, of course, much more advanced ways of looking at this. Things coming from my own world, where I, you know, I did a lot of years of studying human brain function using functional magnetic resonance imaging. And what we what we know from some of that work is really interesting. There is something that we call the fatigue network in the brain, and it’s a distributed set of areas. Some of them are in the very foremost part, front of your cerebral cortex, your prefrontal cortex, some are along the midline in your anterior cingulate cortex, some are in the insula. Some are subcortical, but they’re all deeply connected together. And we can show that if we induce this kind of cognitive fatigue in people, that the ability of those areas to communicate with one another is changed. And here’s the interesting link. If you look at those areas in that network, that fatigue network, there’s a lot of overlap with what we know to be the areas involved in computing perceived exertion. And when we look at the research on inducing cognitive or brain fatigue in people, what do we see? Well, what we see is their perceived exertion goes up, their motivation goes down, and that’s a byproduct of their course. The perceived exertion This is harder than I expect it to be, but it’s also gets into the brains, always looking to the future. And what you see in these athletes is that they’re expecting the benefits of continuing to push themselves. The reward value of those is going down, and the perceived cost of those exertions is going up. And all of that comes together in terms of dropping motivation, increasing perceived exertion. And what we see when we test people in the lab is time to exhaustion gets shorter. Critical power numbers go down. Average power numbers speed. All start to go down. And like everything that we think of in training, these. Are things that we’re coming to understand can be influenced by changes in the way we approach training and competition, and we could talk a little about those, because that’s low hanging fruit that most of us can improve on. But I also hope we’ll have a few minutes to talk about some of the exciting advances in actually trying to increase the capacity of performance critical brain networks to be able to handle the fatigue encountered during intense competition more efficiently, because that’s something I’ve been doing with elite athletes that I work with.
Chris Case 20:33
Can you give an example of that? Like is that a decision making process when somebody, if you’re five hours into a race and somebody attacks It’s your ability to say is, Should I go with this, or should I not? Is that the type of thing you’re talking about?
Scott Frey 20:47
Yeah. So there’s two things I think here, and one of them is what we’ve been talking about, and that is the notion that when you’re experiencing a lot of central nervous system fatigue, your perceived exertion is going up and your motivations going down. And if we can improve the capacity to withstand those effects, even a little bit, those effects that ultimately have detrimental effects on performance, should be reduced. The other thing is, what you’re mentioning, Chris, and that is in thinking about bike racing. It’s a great example, because so much of bike racing is intensely demanding of things like knowing when to go, knowing when not to go, being clear in terms of how you’re deploying your focused attention. There’s a lot going on in mass start bike racing, and if we can deliver athletes to those Crux moments that often happen later in races, just a tiny bit fresher mentally, by having trained these systems, then that’s going to be a performance advantage for them as well.
Griffin McMath 21:51
Dr fry, I’m really fascinated by this researcher who put weights on the fingers of colleagues, which is just, I mean, how do we not know that they’re not irritated by just having weights, that they’re performing less too. But I hear this, and I hear the perceived reward versus the cost, and I wonder, does this essentially put the idea of compartmentalization on its head? Because outside stressors, really, no matter what coping mechanisms you have, you bring it to the table and it’s going to affect you?
Scott Frey 22:21
Yeah, I find a lot of conversations I have with my athletes are disabusing them of the notion that compartmentalization is real. I think it’s nonsense, and I see it all the time. If a person’s Foundation, what’s going on with them in the relationships off the bike, say, their home life, their work life, if they have one, whatever else is going on is not stable and solid. None of the rest of this stuff really matters all that much, because they’re not going to be able to perform to their full capacity because they’re carrying more load. Stress is a huge source of load, and so I’m frequently working with my athletes, and they probably are very sick of me saying this, but my preferred way for them to enter into competition is pretty bored. So you know, some of the stuff we’re doing is, it’s not brain science or rocket science, although it does impact, which is like getting them off of social media for a few days, there actually is some research now showing that social media generates mental fatigue and does affect athletic performance. Video games, which a lot of people go to when they’re bored and locked up in a hotel. It is video games. Well, there’s data on that now too. How can we make adjustments to their sort of mental fatigue, hygiene, basically, right? So that they can realize more of that physical capacity, so we can just get a little bit more out of that functional capacity. And hopefully we’ll get into that training business a little bit too, because I think that’s the other part of this.
Grant Holicky 23:57
So really quickly, I think one of the things that we should touch on is some of that low hanging fruit you noted, and then that is a nice way to segue into the higher hanging fruit that we can work for a little bit. But one of the things that I want to note, and I think this is almost always missed, is that cognitive load stressors don’t have to be bad. It is not necessarily negative things that are going on in your life. It’s not negative stress. It can just be busy. It can just be and as you noted, video games are a great example of this. This is where people go to escape. Social media is where people go to escape. We watch athletes do that in order to not think about the performance that’s coming up. This is what they go to but it is still a requirement. It is still an energy that is put forth mindfully, that’s put forth from your brain to complete these tasks, and that type of load is going to have an influence on what you’re doing. And so what are some of the things that people can do in the. Midst of hard training, or as they approach a race, to kind of reduce that cognitive load that’s going to ideally and has been shown scientifically to boost performance.
Scott Frey 25:11
Yeah, so I want to make one comment before we do that. And people might be thinking, well, maybe this isn’t relevant to elite athletes, but you know, there’s a beautiful piece of research showing with truly elite cyclists. Yeah, they’re elite under 23 cyclists, right? We know those are some of the best people in the world at the time we live, and they have an impact on performance of mental fatigue. So this, I think, applies quite generally. In answer to your question, I think the very first thing is just this conversation that we’re having that’s intended to make people aware of this, right? I think it’s very easy for an athlete to accept the idea that before an important competition they need to reduce their workload. And you guys have had some excellent programs about tapering, and there’s a lot of science and a lot of art to tapering. And if we look at meta analyzes of studies that have looked at the effects of tapering systematically, on average, an athlete could expect somewhere around a 2% improvement in their functional capacity by doing a taper, collapsing across a whole bunch of studies. And of course, there are people who are more responders and less responders with everything. But I think that being aware and adding into the conversation this notion that you may need to do a mental taper as well, or a brain taper, where you’re trying to de load that central nervous system and that that could also have very real and quantitative effects on this functional capacity, that’s the first step right, to appreciate that. This is something important a lot of us amateur athletes. I count myself with this man, I’m training less. I’m heading into a competition, so I’ll do more work,
Chris Case 26:52
right? The scales kind of shift. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Grant Holicky 26:55
And the other piece of that is a lot of the individual athletes, and this is one of the things that I think is interesting in cycling, when you’re part of a bigger team, so much is taken off of your plate. When you’re traveling to a race, you get on your flight, you get there, your bike’s sorted, everything’s set up for you, and you don’t have a cognitive load before this big event. A lot of individual cyclists, or people who are doing guest riding for teams or going into mountain bike races or gravel races, they don’t have that support, and so the busiest time that they have is right before the event. The biggest cognitive load, from a logistical standpoint, is immediately before the event. So one of the things that I’ve moved athletes towards is a checklist a week out, what bike Can we ride instead of your race bike so that race bike can be packed up three days prior? How do we unload logistically so that our cognitive load is less going into that event? And so there’s two pieces that puzzle, as you noted, as you guys noted, yeah, the balance, work life balance, when life is easier, like training and those things, we pour more work into those holes in order to try to get it done so we can get ahead. But the other piece of that puzzle is the pure logistics and the things that go around racing itself is can be incredibly hard. I’ve watched this for years with Ironman athletes going to Hawaii. You see it over and over and over again, the response for a lot of them has been to go two weeks early now, and now that has its own issues back and forth. So there’s a lot of individuality with this, but unloading some of that Logistics is huge.
Scott Frey 28:34
Yeah, and I think people would be surprised, some of the athletes that I work with, and I found it very surprising actually are on professional cycling teams, and some of my athletes are Olympic athletes on triathlon, for example, and running. And you might be surprised to realize some listeners might be surprised to realize that they often have been really overlooking the importance of this central nervous system fatigue as well. So well, they may have a lot more support than the rest of us, right? They’re still not managing in many cases, this kind of load well going into competition, and some of the things we work about is, how can we structure things in a way, things like you’re talking about, huge for athletes that are responsible for all the things, but even for the athletes who are having everything kind of taken care of, there’s still sources of load. And some of them are self selected on their phone, yeah, they’re on the video games. They’re not realizing that this could be costing them performance wise. And
Chris Case 29:37
I think procrastination ends up stacking all of those. They’re like, okay, my race is on this weekend. I’m gonna really train hard up until about a week out, or two weeks out, and then all that other stuff that I have to do to get ready to go to the race. I’m just gonna cram that there, because my time on the bike or time on the trails or running is less so I’ll do all that other stuff. And. Then it just builds up, and then you’ve got this task list.
Grant Holicky 30:03
Yeah, it’s through the roof. And I think it’s wild. How much you see of that in athletes? Yeah, the planning of what it takes to get out the door. Yeah, time management is not and interestingly enough, we see so many athletes who are so much better when they’re very systematic about their day. Everything is planned and everything is scheduled. This is when I go ride. This is when I eat. This is when I do those things which reduces cognitive load. When you come into a period of taper and all of a sudden you have all this free time, you’re filling it with all these other things that are actually increasing cognitive load, but not having that schedule anymore increases cognitive load just by having to now decide when I’m gonna go train, when I’m gonna go eat. Plus, we’ve thrown all these other things into the holes.
Scott Frey 30:50
Decision fatigue is real. It’s huge. We can measure the impact of this, right? We can make people make a lot of decisions and and there’s a cost for that. We overlook the fact that all these kind of mental functions are rooted in neurophysiology, which is just like all physiology. It isn’t like a perpetual motion machine. It costs energy.
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Griffin McMath 32:19
So I have a question. We talk about mental load. Mental load is such a conversation across many industries right now. You talk about relationship counselors have a way that they’ll talk about mental load. Parents will talk about mental load and sharing that in house, which makes me wonder, are the principles of synergistic training reserved for those with privilege or different levels of accessibility, because I think of athletes who are trying to pave their way in the industry and get support by sponsorships, and they have to be on social media, and they don’t have someone who can help them out, so they’re exposing themselves to that. Or, as grant mentioned, someone who’s not on a team who has these logistics already supported. Are there ways to make synergistic training not just for the privileged.
Scott Frey 33:04
Yeah. So I want to roll this back a minute and just say I would love to talk about what I consider synergistic training, which is combining kind of cognitive training to increase the capacity of some of these systems to handle load. What I would say is that in our conversation about this kind of more like cognitive hygiene or cognitive load hygiene. It is what it is, right. Not all of us are today pugachar And have a huge team taking care of all of our stuff for us. And I bet even In instances like that, there are things that could be improved with respect to managing load, but certainly the load of your average gravel Privateer, right, or amateur racer, is going to be much higher. But I think what Grant was saying, and grant correct me, if I’m wrong, is like, how much of the stuff that people are leaving until the 24 hours or 48 hours before the race could have been done seven days ago?
Grant Holicky 33:55
Well, I think so much of it comes down to scheduling. And I love this phrase. I use it all the time with athletes. I think they’re at the point where they want to wanna punch me. It is incredibly simple. It doesn’t mean it’s easy, right? So this idea of hygiene, I think, is so well put. This is when I do my social media. This is when I’m going to train. This is when I put my phone away. The idea of scheduling your life. So many of us hate that to a degree, but we thrive in that scenario, because it does decrease how many decisions we’re making in any given day. This is when I need to do that, and what I see so often in athletes, especially a gravel privateer or even the Masters athlete that does have a lot of time. Their kids have now graduated. They’re off to school. These are the guys I race against. I’m not in that place with a six and a nine year old, right? But so many of the guys I race against, their kids are gone. They’re at the point in their careers where they have shortened hours. They get done at three or four o’clock in the afternoon. Some of them. Retired, and they have the whole day. What do I do with my day, where we’re so used to, since we were in kindergarten, having this heavily structured day that’s disappeared, whether that’s because we’re professional cyclists, or whether that’s because we’re retired, whatever that may be, without that schedule, we’re forced to take on those places I used to joke all the time when I was in high school, when swim season ended and baseball started a two week gap and my grades would plummet because I had nothing to
Chris Case 35:30
do, nothing in quotes, yeah, yeah,
Grant Holicky 35:33
right, right. I had school to do, which I obviously was not doing. I had a chemistry grade go from an A to A D because I just blew two big tests during that time because I just wasn’t paying attention. So these things are really simple in terms of planning your day, planning your training schedule, planning your work, but they’re not easy to do.
Scott Frey 35:53
Yeah, they require discipline to do. And I would just say, like those retired athletes, professional athletes who only have to do training when they’re on their own, when they’re not at a camp, often struggle, in my experience, to manage their time Well, yeah. And they’re like, Well, you know, I could go this morning, but it’s a little cold out, so I’ll go like, Oh, now I need a
Chris Case 36:16
snack, many choices,
Scott Frey 36:19
and pretty soon it’s like their whole day is kind of done, and they’ve still got, you know, four hour ride. They’ve got to pack in and things. It’s an issue, and there’s a lot of stress that comes around that kind of thing well.
Grant Holicky 36:31
And I think that’s a great point, as you go through that day, I have an athlete who, there was a period of time two years ago, very high level cyclist on a team that races in Europe, they were getting workouts done at eight o’clock at night. They were getting on the trainer and getting workouts done at eight o’clock at night, because the day got away from them. And it’s so easy to be in a place on the outside looking in that goes, What are you doing? But in that place, and in that moment for that athlete, that becomes incredibly stressful. You start to get into the afternoon, they feel it slipping away from them. This isn’t right, and this isn’t right, and I gotta do this, and it’s an incredibly stressful feeling. Whereas we assume that the athlete in college has more stress in a lot of ways, their day is super simple. This is when I train. I don’t have a choice. I knock it out. I’ve had athletes that are incredibly good pros that were better when they were full time in school because it was forced.
Scott Frey 37:29
Yeah. So I think, in answer your question, Griffin, it’s an equal opportunity problem in some ways cool.
Grant Holicky 37:37
So one of the things that’s really relevant about all sport, but it’s highly relevant in cycling, is the cognitive needs during performance, whether that be on the mountain bike, there’s a high technical need that is cognitive, and some of that is trained, and some of that we know, but there’s decision making going on constantly in a gravel race and a cross race and a mountain bike race, and then tactically, there’s A huge component of cognitive need in terms of tactical We’ve mentioned this slightly earlier in a road race setting. Do I go now? How do I cover this? What do I do? All those things that go into the equation, and what can I do? Right? You’re also evaluating yourself in the moment. It’s like that conversation about the first half mile pace of a marathon feels very different at the exact same speed than the first half mile pace of a one mile race. How those things are perceived we have to be able to judge those things. So are there things that we can do that bolster our resistance? Durability is the buzzword in cycling now, how do we bolster our cognitive durability?
Scott Frey 38:40
What a wonderful question. And my answer is that there is an accumulating body of evidence late breaking. We started by talking about 100 year old evidence, but this is stuff that’s been happening in the last 10 years and continues to gather steam. And it comes out of, in a sense, my world, where, in cognitive neuroscience, we spend a lot of time looking at how brains learn and how brains undergo this kind of magical neuroplasticity to adapt to whatever load the environment is putting on them. So the idea is that while we can load the central nervous system and show that it has adverse impacts on performance, what if we could like training loads selectively and progressively and in a periodized way, load the central nervous system in combination with physical training? Could we start to drive adaptations through this ability of the brain to become more efficient and for circuitry to become stronger, so that people would be more fatigue resistant, so that the brain had a better capacity to handle this kind of central fatigue. And I think the answer increasingly, is yes. And one of my favorite studies about this comes out of Chris ring’s lab in Birmingham, England. Was. First author is staano, I guess we could link it in the show notes. But why I like this study is they measured a lot of different physiological and neurological things as well as performance. It was a cycling study, and they had some highly trained cyclists, I would say, probably comparable to our like cat two riders. So really solid athletes trained, and they had them in two different studies. The kind of general idea was that they had them do physical training for six weeks for prescribed cycling sessions weekly, and then they were either following that physical training when the athletes were carrying fatigue from those training sessions with intensive cognitive task performance. So performing these computerized tasks that have attentional demands and response demands and decision making, right, just kind of compact it. And these were long, arduous tasks. They were like 30 to 45 minutes of this kind of, what they call brain endurance training, or they had in the control condition spending equal amount of time listening to neutral sounds. And what they found is that, relative to the control condition, the athletes that had done this cognitive training when they were already fatigued from their physical workouts showed really interesting decreases in perceived exertion when they were cycling at a fixed intensity, 80 and 65% of critical power, I believe. And not only was their perceived exertion lower, but their critical power went up. Their performances improved. We’re not talking 20% improvements. These are highly trained athletes, right? But we’re talking a couple percent, and that couple percent at that level is the difference between standing on the podium or finishing in the middle of the pack. And they followed it up. And I always love this, when people try to replicate their effects in the same paper, in a second study. And something really interesting emerged in the second study. They showed that in the second study, kind of repeating a similar procedure when they did the cognitive training in addition to the physical training over this period of weeks. So it’s a nice model here. They got lower perceived exertion again, and they showed that people had higher performance in a 60 minute time trial. But, and I think it’s always nice to show that this isn’t just a one size fits all fix. They didn’t show any improvement in a five minute time trial. Yeah, I think
Grant Holicky 42:27
that makes sense, right? The mental load in a five minute effort isn’t high. Kind of turn your brain off, yeah? Just go. I’ve always found this is me personally, but the 40k time trial is miserable because you can’t meditate for an hour, you can meditate really, really well for five minute intervals, for an hour, everything starts coming into your mind. Well, what does this mean? What is that I just passed this person? This person passed me. What does it all mean? That’s where this cognitive load comes up. But just the point, I wanna jump in on this. How counterintuitive is this to most people, right? The neutral sounds, this is what we’re supposed to do to recover. This is the way we want to come down after hard efforts. This is what social media is for so many people. They think it is, but it’s not so. I mean, this kind of goes hand in hand with some of the research we’re seeing now that the best recovery modalities may be inhibiting adaptation to athletes physiologically during heart training too.
Scott Frey 43:29
Yeah, very interesting connection. I love it. And I think there’s been quite a number of these studies now they’re coming out across my desk every week. And I think we see this similar pattern where combining this kind of brain endurance training, or cognitive training, with physical training is giving people performance bump that is better than what we see with just the physical training alone. And I think that’s a really exciting thing from my perspective as a brain scientist, because, and we’re beginning to see some evidence for this too, this repeated cognitive training. We did things like this in my lab all the time, and you would see changes in the way that brain areas in these networks, like the fatigue network, would communicate with one another. These are trainable, just like muscles are trainable, and you can improve their capacity and improve their performance. And I think that’s what we’re seeing here. That’s why perceived exertion is going down, motivation is going up, and you’re getting a little bit more out of people. And so I like to think of this as synergistic training, because we’re seeing synergistic effects, meaning that the combination of the brain training and the physical training when the athletes are fatigued is producing a bigger bump in performance than just the physical training alone, and so we’ve actually been experimenting here with Chris case a little bit, giving him exposure to some of the things I do. But I’ve been working a lot with my athletes, where I’m programming tasks for them to do and pushing them out to their their phone or their iPad, and often in concert with their coaches they’re due. These tasks, kind of like in this research study, at the end of their harder training sessions, a few times a week, we do a lot of variety in our tasks, because, you know, well, in the lab, it might work to have someone just do the same kind of demanding tasks. People get pretty burned out and bored on that. So, you know, I have about 50 different tasks. We progress the intensity, so that we’re always trying to drive these adaptations, just like a coach would be with workouts. We periodize it, because last thing we want to do when you’re heading into your big race is load you up more cognitively, right? We taper that down as well. And align with the research, we’ve been finding some really pretty compelling but anecdotal evidence that when the athletes stick with this over a period of time, they’re having really good results, and they’re reporting that they’re fresher at the end of races. They’re better able to respond when the brakes are going up the road. They’re quicker in terms of making these kind of decisions, and they’re also less mentally fatigued when it counts. So Chris,
Chris Case 46:01
yeah, I wanted doing something. I just wanted, yeah, to give people a sense of what these tasks are like. I’m doing it on an app. It’s called Soma. I don’t know if that’s where you always have people do it, but
Scott Frey 46:12
yeah, it makes my life a lot easier, because it is the software where I can pick and choose and progress intensities based on their data in a way that avoids my having to do it like I used to in the lab, which is write the code,
Chris Case 46:25
right? So the simplest way to describe some of these tasks is that you’re tapping your phone like over and over again based on what you’re seeing. Sometimes it’s a circle appears on the phone and you tap it. Sometimes there are distractions like only tap it if you see this, or tap to the left if you see zero to five or odd red numbers, or something like this. And so there’s a decision making process. There’s distractions that are popping up. There’s stuff that’s going on the Stroop test. I think maybe, I don’t know if people are familiar with the name, but you’ve probably taken it before. It’s written in one color and it says a different color, and you have to respond accordingly to the instructions,
Scott Frey 47:08
like the word orange written in blue, correct?
Chris Case 47:11
Yeah. So they’re relatively straightforward tasks, but as I’ve seen, some of them kind of get boring, and some of them, you’re just like, halfway through, you’re totally confused, and you’re like, What the hell are the instructions again? I don’t remember what I’m doing or stuff like that. So that was my experience, and I’ve totally and I’ve only just begun, and there are many other sessions,
Scott Frey 47:34
yeah. And so what we don’t want is you not knowing the instructions. So that’s on you, man.
Chris Case 47:41
Well, I mean, you come off the bike, or you come off of a run, no, for sure, and you’re like, I read those instructions halfway through. Mr. Cook,
Scott Frey 47:50
this is the whole, this is the point talking. We’re trying to load you. You know, we talk in training about context specificity all the time, right? We want to simulate training. Should be simulating some component of the actual racing that you intended to, I assume. And this is like that. We’re trying to train those systems when they’re already toast, and
Grant Holicky 48:12
there’s so much that along those lines, this is why you’re supposed to practice with the same pressure that you’re going to perform under, that how the brain responds. This is what we want to see, and this may be why pro cyclists show a better durability in these things, because they’ve been in those situations, deep in a race, hard to do. I mean, that cognitive load is dramatic, and so that experience in those situations, and it’s not this is the thing. It’s not just purely experience. It represents, right? The legs get the blame for everything. But it’s not the legs. It’s the legs and the mind in concert. It’s the biopsychological model of Training and Fitness and performance. They’re so intertwined they cannot be removed from one
Scott Frey 48:59
another. Yeah, and so behind the scenes, what’s going on, Chris is that I’m looking at how long did it take you to respond on average across all those trials for a given task. I’m looking at your accuracy, and I’m also looking at your variability. And one of the things that that is really interesting, so I always start the tasks off with what you were describing. There’s just a light. It appears you gotta hit it as quickly as you can, and you do three minutes of that. That’s a lot, but we know that your speed of performance. How long does it take your brain to relay a visual thing you’re seeing to send a motor command down to your finger to press that button? That gets slower when the central nervous system is fatigued. So this has given me a quantitative way, and over time, I will get a profile of you to see how much load you’re carrying in that central fatigue. And then I also have you do a little survey at the end, just saying, how fatigued Do you feel? And then the other thing that’s going behind the scenes is I’m looking at your performance in these tasks. So some of the tasks might. Require more focused attention or task switching or response inhibition, like the Stroop, and I can then adjust the difficulty as we progress through our work together and try to build up those areas where there’s more room for improvement. And if we were to do this, as my athletes do over time, what you’d find is that we could look at your data and see that you’re actually getting better
Chris Case 50:22
like a coach would physiologically, you’re looking for strengths and weaknesses, in a sense, and adapting the training to build up what needs to be built up,
Scott Frey 50:31
right? So the first thing I had Chris do was a baseline, and I think of that analogous to this kind of testing that exercise scientists might do, looking at one minute power, five minute power, 20 minute power. You guys know a lot about that that I don’t, but kind of like that, and then I could choose the tasks that I want to begin with. For Chris, so yeah, I think we’re entering an interesting time where we’re getting into more quantitative ways of approaching things, like mental performance. And I think we’re kind of trying to be at the front of that in terms of the application,
Grant Holicky 51:01
which is phenomenal, because I think one of the reasons that we struggle so much in incorporating mental performance and mental training into athletes regimens is that it’s all qualitative. The vast majority of our research is qualitative. It’s asking people about past performances. It’s asking them all these things. And I think the qualitative science often gets ignored or poo pooed because I can’t measure it. And coming into some of these things that can be measurable really are going to do wonders, or could do wonders for the world we live in and operate
Scott Frey 51:37
- Yeah. And just a final thing, you know, I don’t think that these metrics are a replacement for asking athletes how they feel, and that’s why that’s part of it too. Is Chris could attest, you know, at the end of this, just do a simple rating of mental fatigue. We need to know that too, because that’s just as important as all of this. And I’m sure grant gets excited.
Grant Holicky 51:58
I do, because I mean, and this comes back to what we were talking about at the very beginning of this discussion, in perceived exertion, and where perceived exertion lays in the grand scale of everything it matters. Perceived exertion is super important to an athlete. Because the misconception about what we’re talking about, whether it’s brain training or mental performance, or mental training, is you feel it in your legs. If you are a cyclist, you feel it in your legs. It may be originating in your brain, or fatigue from your brain, from the central nervous system. It may be your nerves, it may be your anxiety. It may be all of these things, but it is perceived and felt in the legs as a real feeling and as real pain. And that’s one of the things that I really get on my high horse about with all of this is, no, no, it’s not all in your head, right? It’s not even close to all in your head. You feel it in your body.
Scott Frey 52:56
It’s been accumulated together by the brain, but the way you experience it is this way
Chris Case 53:03
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Griffin McMath 53:29
I’m really just curious, especially for people listening, I can’t imagine how this isn’t beneficial to everyone’s brain health. That being said, if someone was listening right now, who would be a really prime candidate to start incorporating this. And when, in their season or in life, does this get incorporated? Because I can already imagine, especially recreational athletes listening to this and going, oh, so I just go for a hard ride, come back on my couch and open up Lumosity. So can you give it the elegance that it deserves here? You know,
Scott Frey 53:59
the idea of brain training has been around a really long time, and I don’t want to poo poo that, but I will say that, like many things, you know, you could choose not to hire a coach, and you could ask, you know, chat GPT, to make you a program.
Chris Case 54:13
He just gave people a really good idea there. Yeah, I’m sorry.
Scott Frey 54:18
Sorry, coaches. I would never want to discourage people from trying to DIY things. I think that what’s going on behind the scenes to actually tune these things to make them progressive and periodized and, most importantly, individualized, that takes a lot of experience. And so, you know, I find myself looking back on my career, where I was, you know, deep in the weeds, on the neuroscience and particularly on the intersection of human performance in neuroscience, and a lot of that is stuff that I bring to the work with the athletes. You raise a good point. There are studies that have been coming out recently taking, like elderly people and showing that if you have them do some physical training in combination with cognitive training. And I guess this doesn’t. Seem that surprising. Not only does their cognitive function improve, but their physical capacity to do, you know, whatever it is weight lifting or aerobic exercise, also improves. So I think this could have general implications, although my passions for endurance sports and high performance, yeah, I think
Griffin McMath 55:17
the last part of that, though, is this is a training, just like physical training. And if you DIY physical training, you also run the risk of injury. So if someone were to DIY this, is there a risk of harm? And what could that look like?
Scott Frey 55:31
I don’t know the answer to that really. I think it would be a minimal risk. I think there’s a risk of people just getting super burned out
Grant Holicky 55:37
by sake of it. That’s what I was going to say. I think that the risk in this is we talk about the dangers of cognitive load to performance. The general athlete, general population, especially Americans, is going to be, well, a little bit it’s good. I’m going
Chris Case 55:53
to do a lot. Wait until you take the Stroop test. You’re not going to want to take
Grant Holicky 55:57
that thing’s brutal, but yeah, you are going to walk into a group of people that are going to finish your ride and then go immediately into all the work they can devour. What’s going to start to happen is that you can get benefits from cognitive load. But the same thing is going to be true when you over train your musculature and your cardiovascular system, you can over train your brain, you’re going to get fatigued and cloudy and slow and all those things that come along
Scott Frey 56:24
with and your performance is gonna go down. That’s what we started talking and your motivation is going to plummet. We gotta find the sweet spot, and a lot of that is art meet science. You know, I’ve got it down now, where we are having good results with quite intense but blocks of about 18 to 20 minutes three times a week. That seems to be a sweet spot where people don’t burn out. We introduce so much variety that they’re constantly challenged. The progression keeps them pushing and getting adaptations, and they comply, which you know, what’s the best training in the world, the training you will actually do so
Griffin McMath 56:56
when in or out of the season, is this being applied? I heard you say something about tapering right before a race. So can we talk about the when?
Scott Frey 57:04
Well, we periodize things. So, you know, my summer athletes are kind of deep in it right now, winter athletes, like cross country skiers, are in a phase of, you know, kind of rebuilding and starting to increase their base. We build on that, and we have a base season right where they’re doing a bit more volume, and trying to build up some of those systems as we get into the races. And I think this parallels what you guys do with your athletes. We start to look more at keeping the intensity but decreasing the volume, and then when we get into race season, there’s some nice paper now that just came out, also out of Birmingham and Chris ring’s group, suggesting that we can use a short kind of priming of these tasks prior to competition to warm up those brain systems, kind of like you warm up your glutes. Yep, and we’re we’ve been doing that for a while with my athletes, and at least anecdotally, their reports are that, you know they want to do it, and they think it’s good, and it kind of gets them
Griffin McMath 57:59
ready to go. So no Sudoku on the start line, though? Well, you might give it a go. That’s
Scott Frey 58:03
your thing. I don’t want to discourage anyone from doing things with their brains.
Grant Holicky 58:07
Yeah, I think one of the things that’s really important about this is understanding how new all of this is. We’re scratching the surface of brain training and how we see this. I mean, think about it this way, when I got my CNPC and my certified mental performance certification, my number is 11 167 there’s only 1100 certified mental performance coaches in the country as of two years ago. Wow, that’s how new almost everything that we’re doing, what Scott’s doing and what you’re putting forth is very cutting edge. It’s very new, and there’s so much more that I’m guessing we’re going to discover about this that’s beneficial for athletes and people.
Scott Frey 58:51
Yeah, always lots of questions with anything involving the brain. You know, we have to think about dosage, and we have to think about getting the most for the least amount of work,
Grant Holicky 59:01
right? And it’s going to be a process, and it’s going to be very individualized, for sure.
Chris Case 59:05
It’s so new, you can’t even settle on a name for
Scott Frey 59:07
it, yeah. So I’m going with, I’m going with what I do is synergistic training, and I should say that, you know, in the work I’m doing with athletes, this is part of what I do, all the other things we’ve been talking about, and then working on having a solid foundation on and off the bike so that you can support that performance
Chris Case 59:24
Very good. Before I forget, let me throw to the question that we were going to pose on the forum. Have you ever tried any brain endurance training or synergistic training, as Scott likes to refer to it. Have you ever tried those techniques? And if so, did you see improvements and how so so visit us on the forums@forums.fasttalklabs.com, and I think it’s time for our takeaways. Scott, you’ve been here before. You know how this works. We want you to now take your life’s work and boil it down to one minute. No, just kidding, this conversation and you don’t have to start. We’re all gonna go. What is the take home message for people? That is the question in a minute, what do you think is the most valuable lesson they can take from this conversation today?
Scott Frey 1:00:09
Yeah, well, I’m happy to start I think the first thing is that there’s potential performance gains that can be had from being aware of the fact that your central nervous system accumulates fatigue just like your muscles, and thinking of ways you can de load or shed some of that fatigue before your important competitions. And then the second thing I would say is that I believe, from the perspective of a career in brain science, that there really is something to training these brain systems that are critical to our performance, to increase their fatigue resistance and improve their capacity to perform at a high level in competition.
Chris Case 1:00:51
Perfect. Scott just said everything so well. We didn’t even need to have the prior conversation. He just summarized it so well.
Grant Holicky 1:00:58
I agree. I was really curious to see what you were going to add to it. My takeaway is, and I’m a broken record with this, what you’re doing off the bike or outside of the physical realm has an extreme influence on how you’re going to be able to perform, not just in a competition but on a daily basis. I’ve always been a big proponent of the idea of Functional Threshold training and functional work, what you’re capable of on that day, and it’s really important that we recognize what we’re doing at home, what we’re doing at work, what we’re doing as a parent, what we’re doing as a peer, what we’re doing as a friend, are going to have extreme influences on what we’re able to do as an athlete, and just that point of social media, just that point of how you’re spending your downtime, not to get on a high horse. But we have a society that’s forgotten how to be bored, and boredom is a huge benefit in our lives, and for this show, it can be a huge benefit to our performance. I’d
Chris Case 1:02:03
change that word from boredom to relaxed, maybe
Grant Holicky 1:02:08
no being used in the scientific literature as bored because it is akin to meditation. It’s akin to an empty mind, and while it has similarities to relaxation, maybe the correct term would be a complete unload, but relaxation, unfortunately, has ties to these things that we think we’re relaxing by doing, like social media or watching crime dramas. There we go,
Griffin McMath 1:02:36
right in the first couple of sentences. Dr fry talked about neck down. And I think one of my big takeaways of this entire conversation is when you think about your sport or you think about just isolating it down to a workout, you may be stretching your body, you might be prepping the actual gear, but are you going into the workout with a warmed up mind, and are you cooling off your mind in the appropriate way as well. So I think this idea of your sport and you as an athlete, you are not a neck down athlete. So we need to start showing up like that, not only as an athlete, but our systems as well. And I think that’s not just on the role of the coach. I think that’s on the role of the races themselves to do what they can to front load some of those logistics and make it easier for people to show up. But, yeah, sports aren’t necked down, so I think that was my takeaway.
Chris Case 1:03:30
Gosh, there’s not much left to add here, but I think it’s a conversation that hopefully helps people look at their lifestyles a bit more, as you’ve said, Grant, to check in with themselves about how brain energy and thought processes can impact performance. It’s not so obvious to a lot of people, and that’s probably a barrier you’re having to overcome to initially get people to even buy into this. And then, of course, the tasks themselves. I’m sure some people would take them and say, How is this possibly going to help me do that? But that’s the fascinating part about the brain. It works in mysterious ways sometimes. So yeah, very fascinating conversation. Thanks again. Dr Frye for joining
Scott Frey 1:04:16
- It’s always a blast. Thank you guys. I appreciate it.
Chris Case 1:04:19
That was another episode of fast talk, the thoughts and opinions expressed on fast talk are those of the individual. Subscribe to fast talk wherever you prefer, to find your favorite podcasts and be sure to leave us a rating and a review. As always, we love your feedback. Join the conversation@forums.fasttalklabs.com or learn from our experts@fasttalklabs.com for Griffin, McMath, Brent buchwalter, Grant, holkey and Dr Scott fry. I’m Chris case. Thanks for listening. You.
