EndurElite Chief Science Officer Matt Mosman discusses how brain endurance training can make you mentally stronger during endurance training and racing.
Brain Endurance Training Transcript:
Ever wonder if you should be training your brain as much as your body to improve endurance performance? That's gonna be the topic of our brain bomb for today.
So the short answer is yes, you should be end of video. But you probably want to know what brain endurance training is. Well, brain endurance training is a specialized form of cognitive training that involves past designed to overload the gray matter in your noggin with the goal of increasing mental resiliency and then decreasing mental fatigue.
During endurance exercise, we often know that the mind kind of limits what the body can do. And with brain endurance training, it'll make your mind stronger so you can push harder and longer when things get really tough.
Now, there's actually been a surprising amount of research on brain endurance training and I want to discuss one study with you and I'm going to read it verbatim here off my computer because my brain isn't really working really great today.
So this study involved two dozen elite cyclists that were given identical six week workout regimens with one noticeable difference. Half were given regular brain endurance training on the Soma NPT. And this is basically an app that has a bunch of cognitive exercises that tests for reaction time, dynamic vision, and then some other decision making quantities with visual and audio stimulus.
So at the end of the study, all 24 cyclists were asked to complete a series of time trials and compare them to the baseline times before training began. Now, what did they find? This is where it gets interesting.
According to the research, those who had received brain endurance training saw not only more physical benefit, better power and distance in time trials, but also less perceived exertion or how hard the exercise was. So basically, in some, this study showed that the cyclists who did brain endurance training performed better than those who did not do brain endurance training before their time trials and other tests that this study showed.
Now, practical applications, how can you involve brain endurance training in your regular routine or daily routine? Well, you can study quantum mechanics, you can question meaning of life, you can do underwater basket weaving, or you can get one of the many specific apps that help with brain endurance training.
I mean, there's a bunch of them. Just get your jitter, I mean, iPhone out, type in brain endurance training in there in the app store and you will come up with a ton of them.
Now, the main thing with brain endurance training is you want to do it every day and then after you exercise, when you're already mentally fatigued.
Most of the studies show that brain endurance training is more effective when you do it post exercise as opposed to pre exercise.
