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Coach Jason Koop covers training, nutrition and recent happenings in the ultramarathon world.
KoopCast
Brain Endurance Training with Scott Frey, PhD | KoopCast #244
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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Trail and ultra runners. What is going on? Welcome to another episode of the 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 brain endurance training how to train your brain just like you train your muscles to handle more reps and hopefully improve athletic performance. Scott and I get into it and, as always, this is one of my favorite conversations. Scott's always been a favorite guest of mine and a favorite guest of yours. Also along the journey is Coach Adam Ferdinand.
Speaker 1:We're going to be coming in a couple of times to talk about how we practically take some of this information from Scott and deploy it with our athletes. I hope you guys enjoy this podcast. It's a really special one. Here is my conversation with Scott Fry all about brain endurance training. Okay, scott, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks again. Offline, we're talking about an episode that you and I recorded a long time ago. That served as a little bit of a template for some of the new formatting that we did, and so I hope you caught wind of the re-release, but my point with bringing that up on air is that it's one of the kind of more cited or one of the episodes that I get the most feedback on. So people are into this brain stuff, as you're probably very well aware. But I'm telling you from a coaching side and from an athlete side people, it makes a mark on people.
Speaker 2:That's great to hear. Thanks for sharing that, and I always look forward to our conversation. It's good to see you again.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I came up with a perfect intro bridge for this, which was actually quite easy, because just this week the Cocodona 250 has been going on. It's a 250-mile race in Arizona. It goes from kind of the northern part of the Phoenix area all the way up to Flagstaff. That I've actually done Continuous nonstop. The men's leader will do it in just under 60 hours, the women's winner will. I think this year was closer to 64 hours, 63 hours and 50 minutes, now that I remember it correctly.
Speaker 1:It's kind of notorious any of these long, you know multi-day, over 100 mile races. One of the one of the key features of them some might call it a benefit is that they go through copious amounts of mental fatigue, primarily induced by sleep deprivation, but also the physicality of the race itself, and so, with that as a little bit of a backdrop, one of the things that I was reminded of is, you see these finish line interviews of people, and usually at that time they can be rather energetic, right, they finish, they're on a little bit of an adrenaline high and, having been there myself and also witnessed this, that energy and that mental clarity that might appear for the few moments, or maybe even 30 or 60 seconds of the finish line precipitously goes away after a few minutes and they go from being able to, you know, talk and come up with complete sentences and good subject verb agreement and the whole nine yards to not being able to untie their shoelaces almost in a span of just a few seconds. So mental fatigue is real, I guess, is what I'm saying Like Cocodona 250, and anybody who's been watching it can certainly appreciate that. But there've been, like we're going to talk about that, and I think that all cheekiness aside of the sleep deprivation and things like that, there are real sources of mental fatigue and some of those I just went over. To start out with a little bit of a backdrop, both from a clinical standpoint and then also from an experiential standpoint, where do those kind of like fatiguing points actually come? From the physical side, the staying upside kind of like all of the above what introduces these points of fatigue, so that we can have a little bit of a level set for what we're ultimately going to talk about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think, as athletes, we think a lot about fatigue and recovery, and it's usually focused on our muscles and how can we get them recovered so we can get the next workout in and adapt to the stimulus, and so forth. But you know, as a career brain scientist, I'm very aware of the fact that the central nervous system, the brain and the spinal cord accumulate fatigue as well. Right, there are physiological entities, in the sense analogous to muscles, if you want to think of it that way, and a bunch of biochemical changes take place when they're being worked, and those demand recovery as well. So we have things like the accumulation of adenosine. It acts like a neurotransmitter in the brain. It's something that accumulates over the course of the day as it goes. A neurotransmitter in the brain. It's something that accumulates over the course of the day as it goes up. We get more fatigued. Caffeine blocks adenosine receptors, so it buys you time, and then, when that wears off, of course, the adenosine comes back to roost.
Speaker 2:One of the things we know, though, is that when you're putting out a lot of physical work, there's also a mental toll for that, and you can look at cognitive performance in athletes who have done structured work in a lab, running on a treadmill, riding up, cycling or something well-controlled, because we scientists really love that for good reason right, and you can show that there are acute changes in cognition with intense training and their performance goes down.
Speaker 2:We get slower and less accurate. And there are also chronic changes that accompany training loads, and those are most extreme when people are overreaching or overtraining, but they happen during the course of normal training as well. So when you talk about athletes competing in these kind of ultra distance races, yes, there's the whole sleep deprivation, which I would think of as more on the lack of time to recover the central nervous system, but there's also, if we wanted to just back that off and look at races that are completed in the course of a normal sleep-wake cycle, where you're not disrupting your sleep. There are going to be accumulated mental fatigue and so forth. I work with athletes whose competitions are not ultra-distance and there's plenty of evidence that cognition changes as a result of going deep physically, and I think it's one of the major underappreciated effects on performance.
Speaker 1:Well, and what we want to get to ultimately through the course of this conversation is if this can be trained and, if so, how. Because that's the question kind of plaguing athletes, sports scientists and coaching alike is that if we recognize that mental, we'll use the big umbrella mental fatigue and you can probably add some clarifications and nuance to that big umbrella but if we recognize it as an important contributor to performance, we want to be able to affect that, Just like we can recognize muscular strength or cardiopulmonary capacity or durability, which continues to come up in this podcast, especially over the course of the last four, six months even nutrition components and things like that, which we're now recognizing are trainable.
Speaker 1:If this is trainable, how do we actually go about and how do we go about it and actually train for it? Because it's one thing to say, yeah, this is like super important. That's another thing to actually go out and like positively affect it so that it's so that it's actually better. Before we get to that, let's like continue to level set right, because we understand, like we understand, some of the components of of mental fatigue, but what does it actually do to performance? So we have this big broad brush stroke and I think it's easy to say, okay, if you're mentally fatigued, your performance is actually going to decline. But can you put a little bit more of a microscope on that and explain how performance actually declines through mental fatigue?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's quite interesting, and you can call it mental fatigue. I think of it always in terms of neurophysiological terms. It's brain fatigue. It's literally fatigue in the brain.
Speaker 1:An organ, right An organ.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right. It has downstream effects on performance that are pretty well documented. So at this point there's been over 70 studies, lab-based studies, where they've introduced fatigue by putting people through, say, mentally demanding, cognitively demanding tasks and then looked at how that affected a wide variety of dependent measures. So these would be things that give us a kind of quantitative measures of performance like how fast can someone complete a time trial? How much power can they put out on a bicycle for a certain amount of time? What happens if we measure time to exhaustion when riding or running at a fixed pace or rate and so forth. To have been 70, 70 plus, I think it's up to 73 now, studies demonstrating the effect of these kind of introducing an artificial mental load or brain load having effects on physical quantitative metrics of performance like the ones I mentioned, and we can take that to specifically to those span strength athletes as well. And if we there's been studies that just look at endurance, performance and effects hold up pretty well.
Speaker 1:One of the things that always sticks out to me in any of those studies and we're going to try to synopsize the whole basket of them at once, so people who are people who are really into this stuff will have to forgive us for not drawing everything out but one of the things that is always quite remarkable to me, whenever I've looked at maybe not all 70 of those, but a lot of them, is how seemingly benign the mental fatiguing task is, or the brain fatiguing task is we normally think of like a pre-fatiguing task, as something to failure. So if we wanted to test like strength on a bicep curl, we would do it to failure.
Speaker 1:We do 100 reps or something like that and then test the strength of it afterwards and compare that strength after that. You know ultimately fatiguing load or a load to fatigue I think that's the best way to put it the load to fatigue in that state versus in an unfatigued state, and everybody can recognize. Okay, I'm gonna do as many bicep curls as I can until I can't do them anymore, I'm gonna rest for 30 seconds or whatever the interval is, and then I'm going to do a maximum voluntary contraction and I'm going to compare that with the, with the pre-fatigue state, and of course the one at the end is going to be less than the one at the beginning by a pretty precipitous amount. But I guess my point with that is is the fatiguing intervention is something grand, it's something big. That's usually when I read the, when I've read these studies. Not the case with pre, like with the mentally fatiguing component of it. So can you describe like a little bit to the listeners, to just like paint that picture a little bit better yeah, I would love to.
Speaker 2: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 that mental load affected physical performance was done by this Italian scientist, neurophysiologist, angelo Mosso. He built a little contraption where people could lift a weight with their finger. So he really got a simple system to test his modeling right. But he could do it very quantitatively and he'd hang these little weights and they'd have to curl it.
Speaker 2:Time to exhaustion was his measure and he did a bunch of studies with his colleagues, his subjects who were his fellow professors and students and so on, of like exam season and really busting it, working through people's dissertations and oral exams and all this stuff and we're really on the limit. So he didn't really quantify the mental fatigue, he just said these guys are physically, these are mentally fatigued people and he showed that in fact the performance would drop off, like their time to exhaustion, and this muscular task would fall off. Now of course that, like many things in science, gets lost and then kind of rediscovered later on. So we've circled back around, you know, in the last, let's say, 20 years or so, and kind of rediscovered this idea.
Speaker 2:It started to introduce mental fatigue in more modern ways. So a common way, like from my world of cognitive neuroscience, is to have computerized tasks where people have to. Usually the scenario is something like there's some kind of visual stimulus or auditory stimulus and difficult in a way that increases their difficulty. That allows us to see those changes in speed of performance, accuracy of performance, and that's the typical thing that we would do in a lab. But outside the lab, you know we could we should probably spend a moment or two just talking about, like what are the sources for an athlete heading into a competition? The travel, right, right, the decisions about gear, the, the disruption of the training cycle.
Speaker 1: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 pin on the visual stimulus, the way that I like really simplify this for athletes is you're matching words and colors to each other.
Speaker 2:That's it sometimes, yeah, I mean, that's one way that's one way.
Speaker 1:But I mean, but most people say green, okay, I can match the green box to the word green, or I can. You know, the word green is in red and I have to pick the red box, like that kind of thing that you're not solving a quantum physics equation.
Speaker 2:Right. And certainly there are things we can measure easily right and we can titrate and dose.
Speaker 1:Exactly and when we bring this into reality once again, using the Coca-Dona 250 as an example, many people are doing exactly that in the day before the race and going through all of their gear and all of their nutrition and every single calorie that they have to pack and all of the hydration requirements and logistics and stuff like that, saving it to the very end, creating this big, mentally fatiguing task before another really big, mentally fatiguing task, other really big mentally and fatiguing task, and so it's a great example of these things that that if you know how they're kind of contrived in a lab, you can see the actual realistic analogs to that and perhaps create situations and maybe not so much of an intervention but situations to kind of to kind of avoid those. Okay, I wanted to take a quick break in the interview and bring in coach Adam Ferdinandson to discuss how we actually help athletes navigate some of the stress leading up to the race so that they get to the start line with minimal mental fatigue. Adam, what do you think about this?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think this is a classic area of something that really deserves a lot of attention and effort and sometimes doesn't get enough attention and effort, maybe relative to the training itself. So when it comes to planning out your travel to a race, you really want to be thinking about these things. You know, with how early you get there, do you have time to acclimate? Is it a new time zone? All those things that can let you arrive to the start line more rested Upgrading your seat choice on a flight, going first class those little things can definitely be helpful and put that on the front end of the trip and then you can cram yourself into coach on the way back. Just start putting your brain in that mindset of thinking about things that can help you just show up to the start line in a comfortable, non-fatigued state.
Speaker 3:I think we've all gotten to a race start line feeling a little frantic and overwhelmed. That's a pretty rough way to start an ultra marathon. So there's that. And then also you really want to consider the overall life stress that you have going into an event. I've seen that play a really big role. So if someone makes a significant move or has some other big life change depending on who you are, that can take a big toll and you want to respect that and how you program the training, and then also that might impact how you approach the week of the race too.
Speaker 1: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 of my athlete meetings to be on preferably the Wednesday, and then second preference would be the Thursday before race. That starts on Saturday. And the reason that I do that is is to not try to shoehorn everything into the Friday and then leave an extra day. If you need to change something, you need to work your drop bags a little bit differently or whatever, and my whole goal with doing that is to free up at least one day, maybe two day, two days for all that mental you know all that mental space. We've all seen the athletes that wait until 10 minutes before the drop bags are due. They're cramming stuff in at the last minute and there's a cost to that and that's what a lot of Scott's research and a lot of what this conversation is.
Speaker 1:There is a cost to that mental stress and that mental fatigue that's associated with leaving some of those logistics until the very last minute. So the point is well taken to try to get all of that stuff kind of off the table as early as possible in the week so you can literally deload your brain, just like you're deloading your body. So we can appreciate that mental fatigue. It does indeed impact performance, right, that's been shown very clearly. But can we also say that different athletes, throughout the course of a race or course of events, fatigue differently from a mental side, just like they do physically, just like people have different time to exhaustion tests, 10k time, trial times and things like that? Do we kind of see the same mental profiles or brain profiles across a physically fatiguing event?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we actually have some science about this. So there have been. There's kind of this niche area where people have looked at expertise in different domains, and one of those domains is athletics, and when you look at elite endurance athletes and you start testing their ability to sustain focused attention or to engage in tasks that put a lot of demands on rapid decision-making or response inhibition or error recovery, you find some interesting things. What you find is they're exceptional in these ways as well. So the study I'm thinking of in particular looked at professional cyclists and it looked at their cognitive abilities and then it looked at whether putting them under these kind of contrived loads, like we were talking about, mentally affected their performance or not. And at least in the study I'm referring to now, they performed exceptionally well in terms of showing resilience to that kind of mental fatiguing load, whereas the recreational cyclists, who are the group they were tested against, showed declines in critical power and time to exhaustion and things.
Speaker 2:The pros are more robust to that and as someone who works with professional athletes and in some of whom are cyclists, it's not surprising to me at all. Mass start bike racing are massively cognitively fatiguing tasks. They have to be on point mentally, because a lot of the decisions that are going to determine the outcome of the race are made when you're very deep into things, and it's very. You're very physically fatigued and also mentally fatigued. So the fact that the cream of the crop would be exceptional in terms of the brain, as well as the muscles and metabolism and cardiovascular systems, makes a lot of sense. And then the question, of course, is that why they're pro athletes Is?
Speaker 2:that another reason why did they get better at that right From having having done that all those years always a chicken in the egg.
Speaker 1:Question right Is does this, does it create the good athlete, or are they good athletes because of that?
Speaker 2:And it's probably both.
Speaker 1:You're absolutely right, it's probably both. Now that's neither here nor there in terms of trying to solve this problem of can we actually train this, but I think the next thing that we need to do to help conceptualize this for the listeners is to try to put some sort of quantitative performance decline on some of these events, and the analog that I like to use in this is what we try to do with hydration. Right, where we know a certain percent of dehydration causes a marked decrease in performance. Call it 10% or 8% or whatever you 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 important is because when you're talking about introducing an additional training intervention to an athlete, you always have to weigh the potential cost of that intervention, whether it's time or energy output or even cost. Right, there's a cost to some of the if you think about aerodynamics, right, in cycling.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:There's a definite cost to some of the, to some of the time savers. You always have to compare that with 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 pin things down. If you do this you're going to get a 2% improvement in performance, but can we just generalize a really fatiguing mental task that's introduced into an endurance task? How much is that going to affect that task overall?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, the answer is complicated, as you knew it would be. But if we look across the studies and, like I said, there's been over 70 of these studies now and if you wanted to do a back of the envelope, and the problem with the studies is you've got, you know, you've got elite athletes, you've got people off the couch, you've got people in between. So it's of course these interventions are going to affect them all differently when it comes to their capacity to work, but I think it's probably on average I would be comfortable saying a couple of percentage points, which is a lot, especially for those folks at the pointy end.
Speaker 1:Okay, and so it's actually like critically important right here, right now, everybody can think about the race that they're training for.
Speaker 1:If you have a few percent margin between what you want to do and what you think you can do at your like, maximum capacity or whatever, which is always a little bit of a guessing game, an intervention like this makes a lot of sense If you're looking at, hey, I need to make 12% improvement or something like that. It needs to be something like this plus something else, and so that's what I mean by we have to evaluate the cost of the intervention in terms of the impact that it actually, that it actually has to have. There's a lot of athletes out there. They just in terms of the impact that it actually has to have. There's a lot of athletes out there. They just need to train more, because they're going to get better overall if they just add 10%, 20% more volume or better training or whatever it is. So it's important to know that going into it, that we're not going to make superheroes out of athletes that aren't very good in the first place. You've got to have a good athlete to start with, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I like to tell people, if someone's talking to you about double digit improvements by doing anything nutritional recovery, training you probably should continue looking, because this is not how things work, you know.
Speaker 2:It's interesting, though, jason, because if you look at, there's a beautiful meta-analysis of a bunch of studies that have looked at the effects of tapering across a bunch of different endurance sports so swimming, cycling, running, rowing and on average, the benefits of tapering are about right around 2% according to that meta-analysis, and, of course, a lot of variables there. Right, we're talking different sports where the types of tapers were different, but I think it's probably on par with that, and I like to say to people would you go to your A race without tapering? And everybody says no, right, of course they wouldn't. So if you think that this could be on par with that, then maybe we need to start having a serious conversation about are there things we could do in kind of the spirit of mental fatigue or brain fatigue, hygiene? Are there changes we can make in your life right that are that will leave you a little bit fresher? And then, of course, the trainability which we'll get into okay.
Speaker 1: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 violent example 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 a completely biased perspective here, but I'm going to ask you point blank Do you think that it's trainable?
Speaker 2:I do, you know, and I'll tell you why. So you know my background. I was 30 plus years as a cognitive neuroscience and professor, ran a big lab focused a lot on neuroimaging and image performance. That was my specialty, Got 10,000 citations, all the academic boxes checked. I'm a skeptic and I saw this research coming out on people using brain endurance training and, if you want to call it that, to try to develop fatigue resistance in these performance-critical systems and offset the effects that we've been talking about.
Speaker 2:That stuff's been coming out, let's say, for the last 15 or 20 years and I was super skeptical of it, but I watched it develop and I watched the papers accumulate to the point where I needed to pay attention to it and take it seriously. And I've been digging through that research and following that research and pulling it together and I'm satisfied that there's really something there, to the point where I work with a small number of elite athletes Olympians, high level performers and we've really committed to doing this training now as part of their plans.
Speaker 1:So what does it look like? Because everybody's going to want to know what like like. Because when we talk about interval interventions, people want to know do I do the four minute interval or the eight minute interval, or?
Speaker 1:the 32nd interval, what's the construction of it and things like that. Peel it, peel the curtain back and yeah, first off, I want the. I'm going to step back just a little bit before we get into it. I hope the listeners can appreciate because I certainly can Somebody who is a leader in their field, who ends up being the ultimate skeptic of something, turn their opinion around based on both what the research was saying and then also what they see in practice. I think that's the ultimate testament to there's something there, not there's this one study about this one person, this one case study here.
Speaker 1:I heard this person tried this. This is, like you said 30 years of experience and looking at some of the initial research with a high, first off high IQ of the domain that you are, that you've been working in, and then ultimately coming around and saying you know what, there's something here, and then putting your kind of like, your money where your mouth is, your practice, where your mouth is, where you're actually doing this with athletes who hopefully like where they're going to make a difference. So just hope everybody can appreciate that. That's just kind of a statement for me, because I think when I run into professionals that have an 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:Yeah. So I think a nice way to talk about this would be to just give people an example of how it looked in the lab and then how it looks in practice lab and then how it looks in practice, or at least how it looks in practice with my athletes, if you don't mind.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's do it, we do that so you know, one of my favorite studies in this area and I think probably it would be a candidate for one of the most nicely done studies is one by Chris Ring's group at Birmingham and the first author, Stiano. People can take a look at it. Maybe we can put it in the notes.
Speaker 1:I'll link it in the show notes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they have two studies. I always love a scientific paper that has the original study and then they go and try to replicate their own findings in the same paper, and they did that. They had a group of control subjects who were undergoing the same training program as the experimental subjects. These were experienced cyclists, they were like cat two, cat three, road racers, and the difference in sort of the treatment was that, following these very structured cycling workouts, which they did four times a week for six weeks, the experimental group would get, would undertake this demanding cognitive task and this sounds really hellacious like 30 to 45 minutes of the stroop task.
Speaker 2:Okay, oh geez that's a lot to do that, yeah, so explain explain to the street test really quick imagine you're sitting there and these words are flashing up on the screen and the words are color words.
Speaker 2:They're like the word green or red or blue, and sometimes the word green appears in green, let's say, and sometimes it appears in orange, and your task is to name the color of the word but ignore what the word actually says, right? So when the word says the same thing, it says green and it is green. That's very easy. But when the word says blue and the color is green, say of the word blue, there's an interference because our brain automatically we're such good readers it automatically activates the word blue, but of course you're trying to name the color, the ink that it's printed in or shown on your screen. You get a massive interference and this is like one of the most widely used tasks in all of experimental psychology, because the effects are so substantial and it causes you have to inhibit that automatic response in order to do it correctly. So imagine doing that for getting gassed on a set of intervals, then coming back and doing that for 30 to 45 minutes.
Speaker 1:It's pretty horrible, but they got people to do it I would rather I would rather do cocodona 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:So imagine these people are doing this for six weeks.
Speaker 2:At the end of the six weeks, they find that the group that did the cycling training plus the cognitive training gets a bump in time to exhaustion when they're tested cycling at 80% or 65% of their critical power, compared to the group that just did the cycling training and then listened to neutral sounds. I think that was the control. So then they do the second study, where they do the similar manipulation, but the testing is different. They have a 60-minute submaximal ramp test for cycling and they show that improves, and so does the 20-minute time trial performances of the people who did the cognitive training for six weeks, in addition to the physical training, compared to that control group. But what doesn't improve is the five-minute all-out power effort. This is really about training something that helps these more sustained efforts. Okay, which should be of interest to your audience. Now, the reason I'm telling you this about this study is to answer your question about what this looks like in practice. What it looks like for my athletes in practice is not what it looks like in the study that I just described.
Speaker 1:Okay, Thank God for your athletes.
Speaker 2:Well, they don't leave, right, I mean, no one would be able to sustain that. And so what I've done is can start to adjust the intensity of that task, analogous to how you might adjust the intensity of intervals that a runner is doing. There's a lot of variety of the stimulus. Think about going to the gym. Right, you go to the gym. If you just do the same thing all the time, you're not going to get the kind of adaptations that you want, because you would adapt to the stimulus. So they're progressive, the stimulus is varied, and what we're trying to do here is drive neurophysiological adaptations, neuroplasticity right, we hear that word a lot what it really is.
Speaker 2:Increasing the strength of the connections between neurons and circuits, right, we're trying to drive these kind of adaptations in these circuits to make them stronger and more efficient. And the analogy to the muscle, I think, is reasonable here. So my athletes are doing these kind of wide variety of tasks. We're progressing the intensity and we got it down to around three sessions, 20 minutes a pop. So inside of a week, usually after their harder workouts, they come in, get their wet clothes off, grab a bottle, sit down and bang out these tasks while they're still fatigued from the workout that's the critical point for about 20 minutes and I get great compliance on that because I they're interested, they're motivated, but they're also getting a lot of stimulation, a lot of variety, because they're not just doing the same thing for the whole time.
Speaker 3:Okay, and I found that, oh, go ahead.
Speaker 1:I just have a few questions before we kind of go on here right yeah, so the tasks that you're prescribing, are they like problem solving types of tasks Like I have to solve a simple math problem or I have to do a maze or something like that? Or are they more visual matching pieces, like all of the Stroop tests? Or is it kind of a battery of a lot of different things? You don't have to reveal the whole thing, I'm just trying to get a general sense of what the task is.
Speaker 2:I'm happy to. So yeah, so it's a great question. So I've kind of grouped the tasks. They come out of my world of cognitive neuroscience. The tasks are tasks that have been used in that world and research unrelated to athletics over the years, and I have tasks that are kind of grouped into different categories depending on which cognitive functions they put the most load on. So the Stroop task puts a lot of load on inhibiting those automatic responses and the Stroop test is one of many tests that we would use.
Speaker 2:We have other tasks that are having you use focus attention and look for a target among a bunch of distractors, right, so using your perception and your focused attention to identify a target. We have others where you might have a different kind of stimulus, that is, let's say, we have others where you might have a different kind of stimulus, that is, let's say, a number, and you've got to respond differently if the number is an even number, an odd number. So we're getting you to make very quick and rapid decisions and you're under a lot of time pressure. So generally I think of our tasks as there's a group of them that are focused more on perception and situational awareness. There's another group that's more on attention, another on rapid decision-making and inhibition of automatic responses. So response inhibition. And then we have some other tasks that are really emphasizing, like speeded sensory motor responses.
Speaker 1:And it's always in a fatigued state.
Speaker 2:Yes, so if you look at the research, it started out with them kind of interleaving training and these cognitive tasks, which is great to do in a lab but very impractical out in the field. So you go in the lab.
Speaker 1:Just to describe this to the listeners and correct me if I'm kind of butchering this explanation.
Speaker 2:If you're doing a 10K run every three or four kilometers, you would do something, so you'd interrupt your training to do the task or to do the brain training or riding a stationary bike or doing an interval, and then in the recovery, doing things, and I sometimes, in certain situations with my athletes, will, with a cyclist in particular, interleave these tasks with an interval workout. It's trickier with runners. There are ways to do it, but what we found, and what the research has found, is that having these tasks done right after physical training, when people are still fatigued from the physical training, seems to produce very comparable effects. So that's most convenient, generally speaking. If we were to do them before training, that can be a problem because it can compromise, as we were talking about the, the actual training, but we don't want to do that.
Speaker 1:So I was actually going to ask the like almost the inverse of that question. So, yeah, you understand that if you did it beforehand you'd potentially compromise the physical training, which we typically don't like to do. There are certain situations where you'd want to do it, but most of the time you're trying to maximize the training. But does it potentially have an impact on the recovery side of things? Because you know how these things go in arcs right First it's the brain and then it's recovery and then it's, you know, some, you know like something else and recovery is becoming, you know it kind of always has been, but it's always been a little bit of a hot topic.
Speaker 1:We're trying to maximize everything we're doing to. There are some athletes and I know and I do know a lot of high-level coaches in a lot of sports that adhere to this where they insist on a wind-down period right after the activity. So take three to five minutes, decompress, get into a state to where you're optimized for recovery and adaptation. Could this potentially interfere with that or do you have a way around it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think it's a really good point and I'll and I have two answers for you. One we know that mental fatigue affects vis-a-vis the brain. It affects the autonomic nervous system. We can see effects of mental fatigue on heart rate variability, right that are analogous to the effects we see in athletes from hard training. So that's something we need to think about, right.
Speaker 2:But with my athletes, the protocol that I found best for them is that we get them started on this within 30 minutes of training. And I chose 30 minutes not randomly, but because the research. When we look at performance on cognitive tasks after athletes have done hard exertions, it's about a half an hour before performance comes back up to normal, depending, of course, on the duration of the physical output and so on. But that 30-minute window, I think, is a critical time to get them started on these tasks. So come in, get dry clothes on, grab a bottle, start rehydrating and replenishing your glycogen and then sit down and bang these out. So it's not a matter of you know, you're dripping sweat all over your iPhone and you're trying to get it done without destroying the device and you're bonking your brains out and all that stuff.
Speaker 1:The sensitivity between the end of the workout and when you start. This, it seems to be seems to allow for a little bit of physical recovery, it seems to, and you know this is.
Speaker 2:You raise great points. I mean we just don't have the research that's looked at, all these different factors, as in so many domains, right, what is the optimal amount of time in terms of task placement and so forth? I'm telling you now, guided by the research but also experimenting in practice with myself and my athletes, what I'm finding has been working for us. So I think that minimum effective dose that we're finding with these elite athletes is about about an hour a week broken up into three sessions high intensity sessions, but about 18 to 20 minutes per session piggybacked on at the end of either a high intensity workout or a big over distance workout, when people are carrying okay, I wanted to take another quick break in the action and bring back coach Adam to talk about this from a really practical point of view, on how we actually handle this as coaches.
Speaker 1:So first off, adam, do you have any athletes that you're actually doing this with and, if so, what are you actually doing? And if not, why wouldn't you be doing them with that? Why wouldn't you be doing this with them?
Speaker 3:So the answer is no. I do not do this with anyone. I think there are use cases that I'm interested in and I'll be happy to take, say, 30% of the credit of just you know. Maybe I should be, but I think most of it is that a lot of people aren't necessarily a good candidate for it. And those good candidates might be, say, an elite athlete, where a couple of percentage points matter, or someone who has tackled so much of the rest of things that this is now a worthwhile place to look for an improvement. But quite honestly, for the host of my athletes, I think we have more to gain elsewhere.
Speaker 1:And that's what a lot of athletes are kind of wrestling around in their minds right now. To conjure up that image is what am I going to get? Is this actually worth it? And I think your point is well taken, where you know Scott's working with a handful of elite athletes on this. I have some athletes that are good candidates for this, but I'm still in your boat where it's hard to fit the criteria to actually to have an athlete that is actually ready for it, and then you actually have to have the practitioner that can deploy it.
Speaker 1:You know people like Scott and other. You know another mental performance specialists out there. They are few and far in between and much fewer and further in between than a sports psychologist or some or something of that nature, because this is a specialized intervention within a, within a specialty provider. So the access alone kind of makes it a little bit, kind of kind of makes it a little bit problematic for a lot of athletes. But then you're absolutely right that that many athletes they can do more miles, they could just get more fit, fit, and that's going to be the bulk of their improvement. So while the all of this is intriguing and I certainly think that we absolutely need to pay attention to it and use this intervention. With certain athletes, there's a whole range of things that that that make it either incompatible with the athlete's lifestyle or something where they're just not a good candidate for it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think for the time being, I definitely lean towards avoiding the negative consequences of what some of what you and Scott talk about, rather than proactively training our ability to handle it.
Speaker 1:Okay, so twofold question. Well, first off, go over. Let's just review the intervention dose in terms of frequency per week and number of weeks that you need to see some sort of reasonable improvement again yeah.
Speaker 2:And well, there's another good question. Okay, if we look at the research that's out there, there haven't been that many extended training studies. The one I mentioned to you from chris ring's group is my favorite because it did six weeks of training right, four times a week. My athletes are doing this stuff in a kind of periodized way, like they do their normal training plan. So we've got like a pre, we've got a base phase, a pre-competitive phase and a competitive phase that we kind of rotate through. And you know they're working on this 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, they take a break as well, but we get back into it just like they do with their training plan. So we're kind of doing our own real world extended programs of this that are spanning. You know, in the longest case I guess we're up to six months with some of my athletes, and you know.
Speaker 2:One other point I want to make is that and I think this is a really important one I'm constantly monitoring levels of fatigue in the central nervous system, and so I want to just tell you how I'm doing that. It's super simple and related to what we've been talking about, but I don't think there's a great replacement for asking people how they feel. I think it's super important to know a person's subjective state, but I think we can do better. There's more we can know and there's something quantitative and not subjective, more objective, that we can be doing. And if you look at the research on mental fatigue not in athletics but in cognition and people have been studying mental fatigue, cognitive fatigue, brain fatigue, in workplace environments, in military environments for a long time you can use response times in simple tasks like we're talking about and show that you know when people are fatigued, their responses on average get slower, they become less accurate and more variable, and that variability is a really important point.
Speaker 2:So in every training session with my athletes they do a three-minute task. It's dead simple, boring as hell. Visual stimulus comes on the screen. They just have to respond to it as quickly as they can. It doesn't come on rhythmically so they've got to think a little bit, but it's just quick. It's measuring the time it takes to perceive something visually and pass that through the sensory parts of the brain to the motor system in the brain and then send the command down the spinal cord and that's a way of getting a quantitative measure of the amount of fatigue an athlete is carrying in that central nervous system as we build up a profile for that individual over time.
Speaker 2: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 over time. You know I get three of these sessions a week from these people. They're doing months. I can start to see the patterns. I can start to see, oh, they're in a heavy period of stress right now. It may be you know you have somebody and you know they're going through an illness, they're going through an injury, they're just got done with the you know 250 mile race or whatever it is. I see that in and we adjust. We're constantly adjusting and titrating their load, just like a good coach would do in any training.
Speaker 1:And when you're doing this, is it being deployed on an iPad? Because I know a lot of people will think of the visual stimulus with something like the Blaze pods or any of the other. I can't, I'm failing to remember some of the other companies out there that produce these, but the little LED things that light up that you will actually touch, you can put them wherever. Yeah, yeah, like, how are the tests actually being deployed?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so back in my lab days we spent a lot of time writing code and programming things, and fortunately I've partnered with a company now that actually provides software that I can use to custom configure tasks and push them out to people's iPhone or iPad, and so the way it looks for my athletes is they'll get their week of plans right and I'll get their data back and I can constantly be adjusting in the background and titrating what they're getting and deciding when to progress, the intensity, when to back things down, and so forth. But yes, they're doing these on either an iPhone or Okay.
Speaker 1:So here's the half a zillion dollar question, and then the zillion dollar question, afterwards the half a zillion dollar question is so, within the task, you're obviously monitoring this. Do you see improvement within the task, just like we would see you know if you're titrating the intensity up, we would look at the, we would look at intervals and, okay, the intervals are getting better, worse or staying the same.
Speaker 1:That's the first part of it. But the zillion dollar one, or the quadrillion zillion dollar one, is can? What are the actual athletes actually saying about their performance, and can you track anything from a performance side of things?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the first question is that, yes, just like any training stimulus, people start to adapt and they get better. Right, they start out. It's like whoa. This is really difficult, and that's why we need to keep progressing the intensity of that stimulus, just like you do with your athletes and their training programs, and so that that's something we're constantly doing. And, as you know, with any kind of training it's non-linear, right, it's not like every week builds on the next it's just you know, going off into infinity.
Speaker 2:Um, there are ups, there are downs and so forth, and that's where the hand tuning and things come in. And I've got some nice software. Is an amazing thing. We can do such such intricate things. We can set thresholds where people have the task actually start to adjust in difficulty according to their performance.
Speaker 2:Hold them kind of like riding your bike on a trainer in erg mode. Think about it like that. For the bring. There's just a lot of nice stuff we can do to progress things and keep people working hard and driving those adaptations through neuroplasticity. The second thing is anecdotal, right.
Speaker 2:So I cap my one-on-one work with elite athletes at 12 because I give them my heart and soul in a sense right. We're engaged in a lot of communication. This is only a part of what I do with these athletes. We work a lot on all the other sorts of mental and brain and psychological skills to support their performance. This kind of, I would say, synergistic training is something we do, but it's by no means all we do.
Speaker 2:And what I see coming back from the athletes, their self-report, is that they feel like they're getting deeper into their races and having more mental clarity and being able to be clearer about decision and also experiencing these slight decreases in perceived exertion for fixed efforts, which I think is super interesting. My athletes are very bright but they'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 kind of reports that I would expect if we were starting to see some of the effects that the research is claiming. So I find it very encouraging we're getting on podiums Now. That's very hard to connect.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, they're great athletes.
Speaker 2:They get on podium right, but their self-report is that they're also feeling like they can go a bit deeper and feel fresher to make the kind of critical decisions they need to make to be competitive I mean here's deepened.
Speaker 1:Here's how I view any of these like interventions, right, if you have a mecca, if you have some sort of plausible mechanism of action, that's the first step.
Speaker 1:And then you have research that tests that plausible mechanism of action and that goes in the same direction as the mechanism, as the proposed mechanism does. That's the second step. Then you have really smart people start to deploy this with athletes and military personnel and emergency response personnel and things like that. That's the next step. That goes in the same direction as what the researchers indicate is what the mechanism of action would indicate. And then, when you have the athletes saying the exact same thing that the research says, that the smart people say that the mechanism says, if all of those direction arrows are kind of like lining up in terms of, yeah, the effect should look like this, then you have something that you can actually like, really, really latch onto, because, for better, for worse, performance is always the ultimate outcome that we're always chasing. And I say for better because if you can test an intervention and their performance gets better, there's absolutely something there.
Speaker 1:Most of the times there's absolutely something there now, because performance is multifactorial, you have to realize that there are always other things that go into it, and you can never chalk up a podium to oh my gosh, it's all of a sudden brain endurance training. Or oh my gosh, it's all of a sudden it's the supplement. Or oh my gosh, all of a sudden, it's the shoe choice. Right, it's what we've kind of like latched onto our equipment choice, and so, for better or for worse, we're always chasing that performance piece, and so when you are looking at the performance piece, I do think you have to have the other directional arrows kind of an alignment as well before kind of taking it under like serious consideration to do, because otherwise you're going to chase around too many things oh, absolutely, and there will always be every study, that of every uh clinical study right that we could think of for medications and this and that and the other.
Speaker 2:They're always responders and they're non-responders. And why people some people respond better than others are the great mysteries of the world, and it's certainly true for training and certainly true for the stuff we're talking about. But we have we didn't get into it much here, but but we have some reasonable ideas and mechanisms. There is a fatigue network in the brain. There are a bunch of interconnected areas in the brain that we can see in functional magnetic resonance imaging that are affected when we put people under fatiguing cognitive loads. And it just so happens that there's a lot of overlap in terms of the areas in that network and the areas that are involved in computing perceived effort and perceived exertion. And what I think is that that is the mechanism by which brain fatigue gets translated into changes in performance.
Speaker 2:It's an effect that comes through our sense of perceived effort, perceived exertion and kind of lowers the ceiling a little bit on how deep we're able to go our functional capacity on any given day, because you've got a physiological cap right. There's the ultimate thing that if you go beyond it, there's utter collapse, but we're never there. The brain is putting the brakes on before we get there, for good reason. That ceiling the brain sets is the functional capacity, and if we can get a little bit better functional capacity, that's when we have the breakthrough. So that's what we're working on.
Speaker 1: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 in your arsenal that you're deploying with athletes. Right, just like field. Two max intervals is one of the tools in my arsenal that I would deploy from a programming standpoint with athletes is just one one thing. So don't like, stop everything else you're doing and do brain endurance training just, but if you're considering it, so option a is hire you right, you're capped.
Speaker 1:You're capped at 12. And, as is the case with every practitioner right, Including myself, we have functional caps with athletes that we can only work with so many. But athletes want, like a resource so absent that like working with you directly, like how would an athlete DIY this for themselves?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's a great question and I think it's a tricky one, and I'll tell you why. Because all the things that we've been talking about, I think there are a lot of elements that go into making this work, like with most kinds of training, this progressive intensity, like a lot of variety, to keep people attentionally engaged and willing to comply with these tasks. It's tough DIYing it. I think you know there are definitely apps out there where you can get the Stroop test, for example, and kind of bang away on this, but it's one of those things that I think is somewhat analogous to. You know, you can get chat, gpt to make a training program for you, right, but it's not going to be the same kind of experience that you have when and I don't think you can reasonably expect the same kind of performance changes that you would get if you hired you to, you know, coach them. So it's tough, right. I think the basic concept stands, though we want to combine physical load and mental load to try to get at this synergistic effect on performance, and so that's the key bit. Now, you're right, I don't think this is a standalone thing, any more than I think, like your example, that VO2 max intervals are a standalone thing. You got to be doing all the other stuff, and I think this works best.
Speaker 2:I've yet to have an athlete, jason, come to me just for this. That wouldn't work. That's not how I work. Everything else has to be in place, right. The athlete has to be doing the physical training. They have to be doing the nutrition, doing the recovery. All of those boxes need to be checked. What we're talking about here is something more on top of that for the person who's looking to take it to the next level, for the person who's going to altitude to get those bonuses you can think of. This is kind of something like that. Right, you don't go to altitude if you're not doing all the things that we just talked about first.
Speaker 1:right I'd be remiss if I didn't like at least ask the question on how to hack it together, because ultra runners are kind of like notorious.
Speaker 1:They're notorious for doing that. I always think of the sauna training that the Badwater athletes would do, where they roll the treadmill into a sauna, and I can see the analog to that in this case being like doing their teenagers trigonometry homework after they've done an interval session, or something like that. But what you're trying to say is it's like, in order to do it correctly, in order to get the right progressive overload term, that we would use training right To create an adaptation. It you can't just you can't just wing it right. It's got to be done in an intelligent fashion.
Speaker 2: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 would never discourage people from trying that. I mean, if you can find some cognitively demanding, loading tasks to do, I would say try, try 20 minutes of it. It's got to be intense, you've got to find ways of having variety to the stimulus and progress, the intensity. But if you can figure out how to do that, I'm a little bit at a loss to think how to do that Once I convinced myself that there was really something here, then the question became how can I make this work?
Speaker 2:I didn't want to go back to the days of the lab where I had programmers and we were kind of hacking this stuff together and then figuring out, let alone figuring out, how to push it out to people. Yeah, I'm not intentionally trying to hold out on people or anything. I just think that we've talked about some of the key parameters that I think come out of the research but also come out of the art of applying this kind of stuff. People could use those guidelines and go out and try to try something, why not?
Speaker 2:I don't think there's harm to doing it. I don't think there's a side, you know, risky side effects or something like that, and that's a nice thing about this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the cost that I was talking about earlier, right To set up this whole value proposition. The realistic cost is time, right, and then maybe potentially a little bit of recovery, if you really wanted to like tease that apart. But you try to mitigate that as much as possible and I think, the interventions where you really can get a little bit of free time and I always remember this really famous quote by John Cobb back in the early days of all of the aerodynamic stuff. And for anybody that's over 40 years old, scott, help me out to call out John, anybody that's over 40 years old, scott, helped me out to call out john well over 40.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but you'd have to be sorry, 60.
Speaker 1:You'd have to be over 40 to recognize who john like john cobb's influence on aerodynamics cycling he has this really great quote.
Speaker 1:He's like at a certain point you just got to buy your speed, meaning everybody's just as fast. You kind of just buy the best components and the best aero wheels and the best aero bars and things like that. And what his point with that is is the cost to it is literally an economic cost to the performance improvement. Here the cost of this is a time cost and not an energetic cost or a risk of injury cost like we talk about with training, load increases and things like that yeah, I think so, and I I am interested in the possibility of developing, like, a group-based way of going through this that could accommodate more people.
Speaker 2:I think, though the point stands, that this is something that could serve athletes well who are already doing the other stuff, and I think with the John Cobb stuff too, you know, if you're not doing the training, getting an aero helmet and aero socks is probably not going to make is make the lion's share of the difference for you. You need to ride your bike more A hundred percent.
Speaker 1:All right, Scott, we're gonna let you go. This is awesome, as always.
Speaker 3:appreciate these conversations with you.
Speaker 1:A lot of those and I'm always appreciative of people who kind of like blaze the trail and, at the same time, make a positive impact in athletes' lives and careers careers. I'm going to link up a lot of the things that we talked about in the show notes, but where can people get to know you a little bit better in some of the work that you're doing, whether it's a website, social media, stuff like that?
Speaker 2: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 on there about the science and also what we're doing, and people can learn a little bit more about my background there, or they and people have questions or thoughts. They're really welcome to just shoot me an email. I'm scott at cerebral performancecom, so nice and simple.
Speaker 1:I love to hear from people and pick ideas around thank you again for your time I'm always amazed at people who give out their personal email addresses and phone numbers on this podcast. We'll have to follow up and see how many people take you up on that.
Speaker 2:I'm not giving you my phone number man.
Speaker 1:All right, there we go. All right, I'm sure we'll have you back on the podcast at some point, but, man, thank you from the bottom of my heart. This has been amazing. It is every conversation that we've had.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you, I agree.
Speaker 1:It's always good to see you, Jason. I love our chat. All right, folks, there you have it. There you go. Much thanks to Scott for coming back on the podcast for his third trip. I always appreciate our conversations. As you guys can tell, whenever you talk to one of these people who is a true pioneer, a true leader in the field, they can always articulate what they're trying to do and what the benefits might be for athletes, for the things that they are actually doing with them in order to improve performance. Appreciate the heck out of each and every one of you listeners. As always, this podcast is nothing without you. This podcast is always brought to you sponsorship and advertisement free. That has been my commitment to you, the audience, ever since the inception of this podcast. I can't even remember how many episodes we've done.
Speaker 1:Right now, If you want to support this podcast, you have two great ways that you can do it. The first way is you can subscribe to our research newsletter, Research Essentials for Ultra Running, where we take topics like this and we break them down in depth and we present our take on them in just plain old English so anybody can understand them. And you can also subscribe or become a USCA certified ultramarathon coach. I partnered with USCA several years ago to create coaching content all around how to become a better ultramarathon coach and how to train for ultra marathons, realizing that there was kind of a void of information in this particular area. Links to both of those will be in the show notes. If you want to support this podcast once again, all you have to do is subscribe to Research Essentials for Ultra Running. Or if you want to level up your knowledge game, whether you're a coach or an athlete, check out that USCA coach certification. All right, folks. That is it for today and, as always, we will see you out on the trails.
