1 new (old) rule for sports performance
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If two athletes have equal skill levels, the one who fatigues first is going to lose.
Think about your final race at the end of your season, where it boils down to who can hang on and perform well for the longest. When the margins are so small, when 1 inch, 1 millimetre, 1 millisecond is all you need to win.
You need to be able to dig deep and hang in without losing concentration, skill, quality, morale or motivation to push your body hard - especially when that pressure is bearing down on you and you’re feeling tired.
This is what it takes to win in these situations - regardless of your sport.
Mental Fatigue + Performance
Science has demonstrated for over 20 years that mental fatigue destroys performance. Mental fatigue affects your perception of effort, which is the overall sensations and feelings of physical stress, effort and fatigue when completing a task.
If you rate your Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE) as high, then you’re negatively affected physically. It is this perception that slows you down, even when your body still has the capacity to perform.
The effects of mental fatigue on sport-related performance
“... review the results of 29 studies published between 2009 and April 2018 and focusing on the impact of mental fatigue on sport-related performance.
Taken all studies together, it appears that mental fatigue impairs endurance performance, motor skills performance and decision-making performance.”
Link to study here.
The cardinal exercise stopper: Muscle fatigue, muscle pain or perception of effort?
“Results of this two-part investigation suggest that perception of effort, rather than severe locomotor muscle fatigue or intolerably unpleasant muscle pain, is the cardinal exercise stopper during high-intensity aerobic exercise.”
Link to study here.
Mental fatigue impairs physical performance in humans
“In conclusion, our study provides experimental evidence that mental fatigue limits exercise tolerance in humans through higher perception of effort rather than cardiorespiratory and musculoenergetic mechanisms. Future research in this area should investigate the common neurocognitive resources shared by physical and mental activity.”
Link to study here.
What impacts your level of fatigue?
Mental fatigue is a key component in sport, because it critically changes your performance by increasing your perception of effort in completing a specific action (both physical and mental).
The sense of fatigue generated in develops in the same areas of the brain, whether you’re experiencing fatigue after a hard training session or from a long day at work.
In today’s world, you’re mentally fatigued by long and gruelling competitive seasons, business deals, sponsorships, international travel, family commitments, competition, social media, global challenges and myriad of other things.
Winning races no longer comes down to performing well, but you must optimise your entire life and minimise fatigue in your every life to achieve the level of performance required.
The performance solution: Brain Endurance Training
In the same way you chase muscular fatigue in order to build a stronger body, you need to chase brain fatiguing training deliberately in order to build a more resilient brain.
Brain Endurance Training (BET) increases your brain’s capacity to handle more fatigue, so you can push physically and mentally for longer and harder - regardless of your sport.
It’s been proven with elite athletes that BET reduces your RPE, which allows you to react faster, make better and faster decisions more consistently and with less errors, push out power for longer and hold skill for longer when fatigued (compared to control groups).
Although BET is a new form of neuro-perofrmance tech, it’s based on science going back 20+ years and has continually shown that any intervention that decreases RPE will increase human performance.
The factor limiting your performance is your brain and by creating adaptions in the brain using BET you will increase your limits.
Brain Endurance Training (BET) (through SOMA NPT) Elite Cycling Training Study
35 healthy participants were given exactly the same cycling training regimens for 12 weeks - but there was one difference: half were given brain endurance training (BET) using the SOMA NPT app whilst cycling.
At the end of the study it was clear that BET AND standard endurance training is MORE effective than standard endurance training alone in increasing performance:
Repeated sprint ability
INCREASED 8% SOMA NPT
INCREASED 4% Control
80% Time to exhaustion test
INCREASED 11.5% SOMA NPT
INCREASED 3.4% Control
Time Trial 5 min
Power
INCREASED 2.4% SOMA NPT
NCREASED 0.9% Control
Distance, 60M
INCREASED 1.9% SOMA NPT (60 m)
INCREASED 0.6% Control (23m)
Time Trial 20 min Power
Power
INCREASED 4.3% SOMA NPT
INCREASED 0.9% Control
Distance, 600M
INCREASED 4.1% SOMA NPT (600 m)
INCREASED 1.0% Control (145m)
65% Time to exhaustion test
INCREASED 17.1% SOMA NPT
INCREASED 2.8% Control
Source: Dallaway et al. 2019
Effects of Brain Endurance Training On Endurance Exercise Performance
Six weeks of BET through SOMA NPT improved physical performance more (23%) than physical training alone (5%):
This higher performance in the BET group was achieved for the same heart rate, muscle activity, motivation and RPE as the control group.
The performance increase in the BET group occurred without a decrease in pre-frontal oxygenation (as was seen in control group), while the increase in heart rate variability in the BET group post-training (relative to Controls) indicates a reduction in sympathetic nervous system activity.
Source: Dallaway et al. 2019
