Time is every athlete’s greatest constraint. When I consult with organizations about neurocognitive training, I often hear that time is a primary concern. They often cite time as the #1 reason athletes don’t invest in training the critical neurocognitive skills that could give them a real competitive edge. However, there is a solution: integrate neurocognitive skills into physical training sessions.
Addressing Concerns When Integrating Neurocognitive Training
In an article on why athletes should train the mind and body together I shared how I helped one organization tackle this very problem. Here we’ll dig deeper into the nuts and bolts of integrating neurocognitive and physical training together.
First, let’s address a couple of common concerns:
1. Time
Integrating neurocognitive training into a strength training period doesn’t require adding time to the training period. However, you can tack on a few additional minutes if you want to or if it is beneficial for hitting your training outcomes.
2. Confusion
As with any other training, familiarizing athletes with the training program and equipment is a key to efficient training and overall success.
3. Distraction
Neurocognitive training is not a distraction from strength training (unless you choose to view it that way). Rather, it forces athletes to utilize cognitive processes that mimic real-world performance such as task-switching, refocusing, and decision making while fatigued.
3 Ways to Integrate Neurocognitive Skills into Physical Training Sessions
While there are a number of ways to integrate neurocognitive training into an athlete’s or team’s practice regimen, here are 3 simple strategies for training neurocognitive skills within a physical training session.
1. Visual Warm-up
The visual system is primarily responsible (80%) for the decisions and reactions athletes make on the field. It also plays an important role in proprioception and balance – key aspects of nearly every physical training program.
Following the RAMP framework, it is just as important for athletes to warm-up their visual systems as it is their bodies.
Examples of neurocognitive drills:
- Eye movement drills that activate the ocular muscles (e.g., saccades)
- Eye teaming drills that require athletes to shift their gaze from near to far and back again
- Eye-hand coordination drills incorporating movement along with simple tossing and catching/kicking
2. Utilize Active Rest Periods
Plugging neurocognitive skills into active rest periods is both efficient (no additional time required) and effective (mimics the real-world demands of competition).
Coordinating with your strength and conditioning staff helps to create a seamless training program that both flows well and maintains the integrity of your (now more holistic) training outcomes. This is a custom service we offer our clients.
Neurocognitive skills can easily supplement active rest within super-sets or HIIT training rotations.
Examples of neurocognitive drills:
- Incorporate simple vision training exercises using heart charts, brock stings, lifesaver cards.
- Include visual processing drills using flashing numbers, shapes, or sport-specific scenes.
- Add Strobe eyewear (link below) to eye-hand coordination drills.
3. Train Decision Making
One of the greatest contributors to poor decisions in late-game situations is a failure to train decision making while fatigued.
By adding choice reaction time, quick decision making, and response inhibition to training, athletes can significantly improve their late-game decision making [link to decision post] and responses. These exercises can be used during active rest periods or between conditioning reps.
Examples of neurocognitive drills:
- Go / No Go is a common yet simple choice reaction drill that forces athletes to make quick decisions with a clear right or wrong response.
- Occlusion training presents sports-specific images or video segments to an athlete, then stops at the critical decision point, forcing her to utilize the cues shown to anticipate the rest of the action (e.g., where a serve will land in tennis) or choose how to respond (e.g., pass to player X as she cuts to the basket).
- Use a simple Stroop, vigilance, or inhibition task where the athlete has to overcome natural tendencies in order to make the correct response.
Bonus Download
To help you integrate neurocognitive skills into your physical training sessions I created a 1-page infographic of the strategies in this post.
Integrate Neurocognitive Skills for Next Level Training
Training athlete cognition is the next frontier in mental performance training. It is important to train the mind and body together to best prepare athletes for the mental and physical demands of competition. Utilize the practical strategies in this post to integrate neurocognitive skills into your physical training sessions and give your athletes the competitive edge they deserve!
If you need additional support, reach out to us. That’s what we do – we build cognitive training programs that work!
Question: What are other ways you are integrating cognitive training?I’d love to hear from you in the comments below, or on Facebook or Twitter.
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