Apr 4, 2020
Brain Endurance Training — Making Elite Athlete’s even better
The traditional narrative of human performance has focused on cardiovascular, respiratory, metabolic and muscular mechanisms.
Fatigue has typically been viewed as a matter of physiological characteristics incorporating the following : Glycogen depletion, pulmonary ventilation, cardiac output and onset of blood lactate. Whilst also factoring certain genetic and environmental advantages. For example, Afro-Carribean’s possesing a higher percentage of Type IIB Fast Twitch fibre’s.
Whilst Kenyan and Ethiopians possess a unique blend of genetics that provides favourable adaptations for endurance events. Being well conditioned from an early age walking and running vast distances above 10,000ft+ in their highlands. Thus enabling adaptations to performance in elevated environments such as maximal oxygen uptake, high haemoglobin and favourable muscle fibre composition.
From the above it would be quite skewed to assume that environments and genetics dictate the performance profile of athletes. The very fact that well trained and conditioned athletes from around the world take part in competition with the genetically and environmentally gifted negates the narrative that human performance can be assessed solely on physical characteristics alone.
Taken that all athletes are highly conditioned and trained competitively the underlying determining factor between who win’s and who loses is fundamentally down to which athletes brain is more resilient. Those athletes that are still capable when the competition is faltering.
The Brain’s role in performance:
Many athlete’s don’t realise that the brain plays the determining role in their performance. However as early as the 1890’s Italian scientist Angelo Mosso published preliminary evidence regarding the effects of cognitive activity on fatigue. In summation Mosso concluded that his fellow physiology professor’s experienced reduced muscular endurance after administering lectures and oral exams to students.
More recently, a 2009 study in The Journal of Applied Physiology found that cognitive fatigue limits athletic performance. From the study athletes who performed heavy cognitive tasks before a time-to-exhaustion cycling task could only cycle for 640 seconds whilst athletes that did not perform the cognitive tasks were able to cycle for 754 seconds.
Despite it’s role in performance, the brain has been largely overlooked in athletic performance training. However due to it’s prominent role in exercise tolerance it make’s sense that elite athletes and those wanting to break into elite level emphasise a more deliberate and structured approach of training the brain thus allowing them to push performance limits to an entirely new level.
The only limiting factor that has prevented BET being accessible and allowing these performance gains to take place across the world was the lack of a platform that delivered the targeted neuroscience & sports vision related drill’s. One that was data driven and structured based on the athletes neural demands with the correct loading parameters for their individual sport.
We at Synapse Neuro Performance Solutions are proud to be a world leader in harnessing the latest mobile Brain Endurance Training technology and delivering bespoke solutions to athletes, teams & coaches as well as high performance organisations & individuals globally.
For more information on Brain Endurance Training check out www.synapseneuroperformance.com or contact via email info@synapseneuroperformance.com and schedule a call with us in order to discuss your specific requirements and get started!
