Featured Articles

Everyone is Different

Everybody is different. This seems obvious. Then why do most training programs and advice start with this premise – “it worked for someone else, it should work for you”? Even when advice targets a group of similar athletes, there is still a broad assumption that everyone in that category is equivalent. They may be in one way (e.g., age or years of experience), but in every other way they are likely quite different. Everyone comes with their own strengths and weaknesses. Consider this:

You have unique physiology, reasons for running, lifestyle and preferences.
You have genetic potential which is characterized by the size of your bones, limb length, muscle leverage, etc.
You have had your own unique prior experiences, environment, and diet.

There is no chance that you are the same as anyone else. Two people with similar builds, age and experience may respond completely differently to the same training run, strength training routine or running shoes. One may have experience running in the heat, the other not so much. One may have an injury history that impacts their running, the other duck feet. We get better at some things and worse at others over time. We change our nutrition and environment. What worked for us at one point may not anymore. How can we know if an exercise is effective for us?

Fortunately, our brains can tell us! You just have to know how to ask. You can perform assessments to understand whether what you are doing is beneficial at this particular time. Assessments are critical in determining what your brain considers threatening or non-threatening to you. It might be worth thinking of something that assesses well as reducing overall threat and something that assesses poorly as increasing threat. And the greater the threat, the more your brain is going to constrain your performance. Think of it as putting on the brakes. Conversely, reducing threat by performing beneficial activities, is like stepping on the gas.

For example, a pebble in your shoe is very unlikely to assess well. Your brain can predict that over time the pebble will likely cause harm. You will likely perceive pain and a reduction in performance until you fix the problem. That response is going to be pretty common for everyone. Now imagine two people wearing the same make of shoe. The shoes may be perfect for one runner and awful for the other. Neither runner may be able to cognitively perceive the difference. However, their non-conscious brains will perceive the difference and the shoes will assess differently for each.

At NeuroRunner, we offer individual assessments to help you be a better runner in the context of your own goals. For example, you’ll be able to:

Pick the most effective training for you
Improve the quality of your training mileage
Pick the right equipment
Find the best warm up
Perform better when it matters
Measure improvement

You will find that you are not always conscious of threat, so assessments are critical. Over time you may find that you become more intuitive about the process and be able to feel a positive response to a change. But by assessing regularly, you will improve the specificity, efficiency and results of your training. Doesn’t that beat taking training advice that worked for someone else?

Changing Inputs Changes Outputs

Why do I have good days and bad days? Do I run better when it’s hot or cold? Can I run as fast at night as during the day? Does my performance deteriorate when I’m dehydrated? Do I have more pain some days than others?

Your non-conscious brain receives millions of sensory signals a second. Additionally, it’s taking input from your conscious brain. What’s it doing with all that information? You might think it’s just storing some of it away and tossing the rest. Making memories, right? It’s certainly doing some of that. Its most important function is to keep us safe. It’s constantly evaluating all available information to do so.

Sensory Inputs

Your senses allow you to perceive the outside world, right? Right, but also your inside world and the position of your body in space. They tell your brain:

What’s going on inside your body, like the state of your organs and blood chemistry
What’s going on outside your body, like temperature, sound, smell, taste, touch, etc.
Where your body is and how it’s moving through space, like the angle of a joint or the location of a body part

Physiological and Emotional Outputs

You’re surely aware that your heart rate, breathing rate, blood pressure, sweat and pupil size all change in response to stress, general or acute. This is what allows a polygraph to detect whether you are lying or not. You also likely know that extreme stress results in fight, flight or freeze responses.

What is less widely understood is that your brain is also constantly adjusting local blood flow, muscle firing rates, hormone release, strength, coordination, range of motion and sensory acuity. It’s triggering feelings or emotions, like pain, fatigue, anxiety and elation in response to its interpretation of sensory inputs.

What Are You Thinking?

How does your brain evaluate the information it’s receiving so it can make the proper adjustments to outputs? Prior experience. Your brain is a predictive organ. If it has positive experiences that match your current circumstances, it’s likely to promote more of the current activity. If it has negative priors, it’s going to make corrections that reduce the activity. If you’ve never experienced anything like you are now, or haven’t in a long time, it’s likely to reduce that activity also. The familiar and positive is relaxing. Everything else is potentially stressful.

Additionally, your brain is keeping a running tally of stress, or maybe a better term is threat. In addition to evaluating your current activity, it’s evaluating everything else that’s going on in your life. If your boss is on your case, you fought with your spouse; you’re recovering from an injury, you sit too much, have over-trained and move badly, it all adds up and you are not likely to perform well. The activity you are currently engaged in may not be threatening to your brain, but the sum of other things in your life is.

So What?

After having read all this, you could come to the conclusion – “Interesting, but I can’t do anything about it, so why should I care?”. In fact, thats where most people land with or without understanding. There is a huge opportunity, though:
While you can’t easily change how your brain’s responds to threat (outputs).
And you can’t change your brain’s threat evaluation process
You can increase your library of positive prior experience and reduce overall levels of threat.
You certainly can change your sensory inputs, both what you are experiencing and how well you sense it (sensory accuity).

You are changing your sensory inputs every time you move or change your environment or body chemistry. The resulting physiological changes are nearly instantaneous. Not every sensory change is important enough for your brain to change threat levels and physiological outputs. NeuralTraining will help you explore changing sensory input, improve sensory acuity, accumulate beneficial experience to find what works best for you. You can also experiment for yourself to see if the following items (and much more) could make a difference:

Different shoes or clothing?
Different sunglasses?
Belly breathing and breathing cadence?
Improved mobility?
Different warm-up routines?

The result will be reduced threat and better running performance because you’ll be taking the brakes off of the fitness you’ve earned.

Improve your senses to improve your running

It’s rare that anyone considers improving their senses to improve their running. Honestly, it’s rare that anyone considers improving their senses at all. That’s mostly because they don’t know that it’s possible, how to do it or why it matters. When you understand how the brain evaluates risk and limits performance accordingly, the value of sensory skill becomes apparent.

Your brain receives 11 to 20 million signals per second of sensory information, everything you see, hear, smell, taste and feel. But it also receives loads of other information about your surroundings, your movement and position and your body chemistry. For instance, think about proprioception, homeostasis monitoring and inner ear as senses too. Your brain constantly evaluates information and adjusts your capabilities based on perceived risk to your safety or survival.

Why might that matter to running? Some of the capabilities that your brain controls and adjusts for risk include blood flow, flexibility, muscle firing rates and strength, coordination, respiratory rate, and heart rate. Sound relevant?

Which senses matter most to your running and could be worth some training? While everyone is different and anything can cause anything, the most likely movements to benefit your running are vision, inner ear, and proprioception. While each is important in its own right, together they are the key elements of balance which makes them doubly important. In addition to improving sensory function, it’s important to improve your brain’s tolerance and reaction to sensory information. For instance, improved tolerance to CO2 levels in your bloodstream may keep you from over breathing. Training in different temperatures may help you become a better hot or cold runner. Better proprioception may help keep an ankle roll from becoming a sprain.

So, if you’re looking for what might be holding your running performance back, want to accelerate your progression, prolong your running career or just enjoy running more, give sensory training a try. One particularly nice thing is that doesn’t take much time and can be done anywhere.

Neurology in Action – Lessons from Alex Honnold

On June 3^rd, 2017, Alex Honnold became the first climber to ever climb Yosemite’s El Capitan with no ropes or protection. He did the climb in 3 hours and 56 minutes. To put it in perspective:

The route is in no way easy or short
- 3,300 feet, pretty much straight up
- Some of the best climbers have taken days (4 on average) to climb it, with protective equipment
- Most climbers rope up, even for easy climbs
One mistake would likely have taken his life.

So how does one get comfortable with performing well with that level of challenge and risk? Practice, practice, practice.

By the time he performed this incredible feat (difficult movement that could be performed with no mistakes for four hours straight under the most stressful circumstances), he had climbed the route multiple times over years with protection. He described handholds as “old friends”. He knew that he had the physical skills and deliberate practice to climb the route, he just had to stay in control mentally. This is an interesting Rolling Stone article about an incredible accomplishment.

The following video interview is was conducted well before Alex did the climb but after he started contemplating it. It gives a good insight about his approach to taking on a daunting challenge. Interestingly, he doesn’t talk about additional physical preparation, it’s all mental. One could think of it as preparing until he was confident of success.

What could you learn from this?

It’s unlikely that the level of practice Alex put in is warranted for a single event. However, image a running race where you knew you had all the required elements in the bag. You’d run the distance before, maybe farther. You’d run in the heat or the cold enough to know you could tolerate it. You’d raced in crowds before and knew you could maintain your pacing. You’d even run the course or terrain before. Your non-conscious brain is going to feel confident and unthreatened by the challenge – been there done that. Now you just have to keep your conscious brain from getting in the way. Alex controls his thoughts very well – focus when he needs it, some mind wandering when he doesn’t; always positive and no what ifs. If you’ve prepared well, you have a much better chance of similarly controlling your thoughts.

It’s also interesting to hear what Alex had to say before and after. The task was unimaginable in 2009. Post climb, he described it as almost routine. In fact, he was going to get another workout in that day.