We think it’s FTP or our ability to deliver oxygen that determines how hard we can go—and certainly, if one athlete has a VO2max of 91 and another is at 40, the athlete at 91 is likely going to win the race. But for each of us, what determines if we have a peak performance or have to back down on any given day is less about these “hard” physiological markers and more about our perceived exertion.
Consciously or subconsciously, our brains are always calculating just how hard our effort is and whether we can hold it for the length of the event. A lot of factors play into that assessment beyond just the strength of our legs. Simply having a mentally fatiguing day at work can make our workout feel harder than normal. When too many other factors play in, our perception can be that the effort is harder than it really is, causing us to slow down when we can go faster.
Here to teach us about this concept of perceived effort and how we can manipulate and train perceived exertion to go harder, is the owner of Cerebral Performance, Dr. Scott Frey, and mental performance coach, commentator, retired professional cyclist, and Olympian Brent Bookwalter. Together, they have created Project Tailwind to help athletes train their mental strengths.
They’ll define perceived exertion for us and then get into the practical sides of discussing how we can influence our perception. Bookwalter will share how he prepared for races to reduce his cognitive load, and Dr. Frey will tell us about new science that shows how we can train perceived exertion to potentially gain 10 to 30 watts in our power.
So, put on your thinking cap, and let’s make you fast!
References:
Bayne, Freya, Sebastien Racinais, Katya Mileva, Steve Hunter, and Nadia Gaoua. 2020. “Less Is More—Cyclists-Triathlete’s 30 Min Cycling Time-Trial Performance Is Impaired With Multiple Feedback Compared to a Single Feedback.” Frontiers in Psychology 11:608426. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.608426.
Davis, Paul A., and Andreas Stenling. 2020. “Temporal Aspects of Affective States, Physiological Responses, and Perceived Exertion in Competitive Cycling Time Trials.” Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports 30 (10): 1859–68. https://doi.org/10.1111/sms.13766.
Hays, Kate, Ian Maynard, Owen Thomas, and Mark Bawden. 2007. “Sources and Types of Confidence Identified by World Class Sport Performers.” Journal of Applied Sport Psychology 19 (4): 434–56. https://doi.org/10.1080/10413200701599173.
Hogan, Patrick S., Steven X. Chen, Wen Wen Teh, and Vikram S. Chib. 2020. “Neural Mechanisms Underlying the Effects of Physical Fatigue on Effort-Based Choice.” Nature Communications 11 (1): 4026. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-17855-5.
Marcora, Samuele. 2009. “Perception of Effort during Exercise Is Independent of Afferent Feedback from Skeletal Muscles, Heart, and Lungs.” Journal of Applied Physiology 106 (6): 2060–62. https://doi.org/10.1152/japplphysiol.90378.2008.
Pageaux, Benjamin. 2014. “The Psychobiological Model of Endurance Performance: An Effort-Based Decision-Making Theory to Explain Self-Paced Endurance Performance.” Sports Medicine 44 (9): 1319–20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-014-0198-2.
Peng, Fan, and Li-Wei Zhang. 2021. “The Relationship of Competitive Cognitive Anxiety and Motor Performance: Testing the Moderating Effects of Goal Orientations and Self-Efficacy Among Chinese Collegiate Basketball Players.” Frontiers in Psychology 12:685649. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.685649.
Pettersen, Susann Dahl, Per M. Aslaksen, and Svein Arne Pettersen. 2020. “Pain Processing in Elite and High-Level Athletes Compared to Non-Athletes.” Frontiers in Psychology 11:1908. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01908.
Staiano, Walter, Samuele Marcora, Marco Romagnoli, Ulrich Kirk, and Christopher Ring. 2023. “Brain Endurance Training Improves Endurance and Cognitive Performance in Road Cyclists.” Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport 26 (7): 375–85. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsams.2023.05.008.
Taylor, Daniel, and Mark F. Smith. 2017. “The Influence of Mid-Event Deception on Psychophysiological Status and Pacing Can Persist across Consecutive Disciplines and Enhance Self-Paced Multi-Modal Endurance Performance.” Frontiers in Physiology 8:6. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2017.00006.
Episode Transcript
Trevor Connor 00:00
Trevor, hello and welcome to fast talk. Your
Trevor Connor 00:06
source for the science of endurance performance. I’m your host. Trevor Connor, here with Coach grant holicy. We think it’s our FTP, our ability to deliver oxygen, that determines how hard we can go. And certainly, if one athlete has a vo two max at 91 and another is at 40, the athlete at 91 is likely going to win the race. But for each of us, what determines if we have a peak performance or have to back down on any given day is less about these hard physiological markers and more about our perception of effort. Consciously or subconsciously, our brains are always calculating just how hard our effort is and whether we can hold it for the length of the event. A lot of factors play into that assessment, beyond just the strength of our legs, simply having a mentally fatiguing day at work can make our workouts feel harder than normal when too many other factors play in our perception. Could be that the effort is harder than it really is causing us to slow down when we can actually go faster. Here to teach us about this concept of perceived effort and how we can train and manipulate it to go harder. Our owner of cerebral performance, Dr Scott fry and ex Pro turned Tour de France commentator Brent Bookwalter, together, they have created Project tailwind to help athletes train their mental strengths. They’ll define perceived exertion for us and then go into the practical side to discussing how we can influence our perception. Brent will share how he prepared for races to reduce his cognitive load, and Dr fry will tell us about new science that shows how we can train perceived exertion to potentially gain 10 to 30 watts in our power. So put on your thinking cap, and let’s make you fast. Well, Brent. Dr fry, great to have you on the show again.
Scott Frey 01:35
Treat to be here. Thanks for the invitation. Good to be back. And
Trevor Connor 01:38
Brent, it’s been kind of a year and a half since we’ve had you on the show. And I’d say there’s been small changes in your life since then,
Brent Bookwalter 01:47
small changes, big changes. Yeah, I think regardless of who I talked to in the interval, I talked to them at it’s a time of a lot of change. Definitely the past couple years. I think last time we talked was, was before the Tour de France in 2023 maybe. So yeah, I’ve been, I’ve been immersed in that gig in July, covering the tour the past two summers. Probably bigger impact was a our second child was born. Our daughter was born just over a year ago. So now I’m a father of two, and also started a graduate school program in applied sport and performance psychology, also about a year ago that coincided almost to the day with our daughter being born. Yeah, we’ve made a local move, changed houses, lots of moving and shaking, but good to have a constant of coming back here and talking training and getting fast with you guys. Yeah,
Trevor Connor 02:33
well, I was actually just referring to the fact I heard you bought a new bike. But hey, all that stuff’s cool too.
Brent Bookwalter 02:40
Yeah. Well, I got lots of good bikes too, if the crew over at BMC still takes good care of me and man, I’ll say the my physical fitness continues to decline, but thanks to the BMC bike technology and all that beautiful Swiss engineering, I think I’m going just as fast as ever, at least on the mountain bike out on the trails. Man, the mountain bike technology these days is off the chain. It is,
Grant Holicky 03:01
and this is what we’ve been telling. Trevor, all you have to do is upgrade the bike and you’re gonna beat everybody. Everybody. There is
Trevor Connor 03:07
no bike that can compensate for what I have lost in my legs.
Grant Holicky 03:13
Fair enough, you’d be better off than where you are. That’s all I’m saying. It’s all I’m saying.
Brent Bookwalter 03:18
I’m a good case study in this. Trevor, yeah, well, Brent,
Trevor Connor 03:21
so here’s the world ahead of you. I went out and did five minute intervals the other day, and I was doing them at a lower wattage than what I used to be able to hold for an hour. Yeah, it’s just not fun to see.
Brent Bookwalter 03:33
Well, there’s probably something to your perceived exertion in there, which we’re gonna get to here. There
Grant Holicky 03:37
you go.
Trevor Connor 03:38
So guys, before we dive into this episode, there was one thing that I really wanted to ask the two of you about. Dr Frey, you mentioned to me in an email that the two of you are working on a project together. So tell us a little bit about this project.
Scott Frey 03:50
Yeah. So Brent and I launched something called Project tailwind, and the idea behind it, I think, and Brent please chime in, is that mental performance training shouldn’t be just available to people at the pointy end of the spear or professional athletes that amateur athletes juggling families, careers and so forth, like so many of the people who are listening this podcast are, have much to gain by Getting access to some of these skills and techniques. And so our idea was that we would create a program that would be a group based program to really provide this kind of education and help to get that information into the hands of people. And so we launched it with the Belgian waffle ride in Brent’s hometown in Asheville, North Carolina, and we’re looking at developing this further in association with other races, but also as a freestanding, online, live kind of thing that we can do with people. Yeah,
Brent Bookwalter 04:53
and this really comes from for me personally, the points and parts of my career. Where I took it upon myself and and realized that the one area I was not working on was my mind was my mental preparation, my mental strength. And that’s a big message here is that brain training, mental training, sports psychology, whatever you want to call it, it’s not only if you’re broken or if you’re hurt or if there’s a big problem, it’s a it’s a way we can cultivate strength and improvement with ourselves, just like we do with our physical training. So it’s not meant to replace any of the physical training, either. But when you’re preparing for a big event or a training camp with your team, you know many of us, most of us, we do have our physiological coaches, or we’re working through a training plan. We’re measuring aspects of our performance, remeasuring. We’re trying to get better. You can do the same with the brain and the mental approach. And I’m really excited to be working with Dr fry as we can we can offer this to teams, small groups, or even to individuals as a standalone and ideally in a perfect world, it’d be a situation where we’re doing some education, some application, but then also some implementation with actual individuals, with teams at the event, because I think there’s, there’s so much to offer, translating the concepts, the theories, the education, to actually being face to face with people. And that’s what I’m excited to get into Scott with. It’s as we continue to roll this out,
Grant Holicky 06:21
I think a big part of this something to just add. You bring up a great point Brent that you had to go out and try to find this over the course of your career, it wasn’t there available for you. And what’s great about what you guys are doing is it creates an availability. It creates an ability for people to go out and just plug it into what they’re already doing. One thing I’d love to add in terms of when everybody will need this, we tend to look at our other competitors and say, well, that one is just strong mentally, but eventually, as they go up the line, they’re going to come to a situation in which they’re going to need that mental strength. And if we’re not working on it, we’re not preparing for it, we’re just not going to be ready for it.
Scott Frey 07:02
And the older we get, the more it matters, because, like it or not, our physiology is going to change. We’re not going to be hitting the same numbers that we were when we were younger, but we can offset some of that loss, I believe, by working on the kind of things we’ve been discussing. I
Trevor Connor 07:20
remember having a conversation with my dad about my time being full time as a cyclist, and he had been very supportive of it. And I asked him why, and he said there is a mindset and mental skills that you develop as an athlete that will serve you in everything you do in life. And then that’s exactly what you guys are talking about.
Scott Frey 07:39
Yeah, ideally, that’s the bigger picture of all of this. So
Trevor Connor 07:42
Dr Frey, tell us a little bit about what we’re talking about today, and you have two studies that you wanted to start out with to show how kind of cool this subject is.
Scott Frey 07:51
Yeah. So I think one way to set up our conversation is to answer the question of, what’s the job of your brain? We could come up with a bunch of different answers. But for this crowd, I think the best way to explain it is to say our brain’s job is to keep us alive. It regulates all the functions of the body. Everything you guys talk about in this podcast, it all gets back to the brain, at least for this brain scientist, and part of that job of keeping you alive is knowing when to grab the brakes and hold you back, but there’s a bit of a disconnect, because when we’re out there doing your five minute intervals at altitude racing, we’re asking our bodies to do things that are really challenging, and the brain isn’t really clear on how long we’re going to be putting ourselves under that load of stress, and quite naturally, in its protective role, it wants to slow us down. It wants to grab the brakes. It wants to limit our performance. And I think one way of really framing our conversation about perceived exertion is that all of the things that constitute that perception of how hard we’re working, respiratory rate, your heart beating out of your chest, the burning in your legs, the overwhelming fatigue that you feel if you continue down that path for very long, those are all ways that your brain is giving you the signal to slow it down before you get anywhere near your full physiological capacity. So a lot of the work that we’ve been doing with athletes is looking to the science to tell us what levers to pull, what dials to turn to be able to get them to go a little bit deeper into that perceived exertion, to get a little bit closer to those physiological boundaries. I
Trevor Connor 09:48
think one of the most vivid examples I’ve seen of this that I love is those stories of people who are out for a hike and they get lost and they’re struggling, they haven’t eaten in a while. They. Haven’t had water, and they’re on the trail going, I can’t go on, I can’t go another minute longer. And then suddenly see their car, and it’s two minutes away, and they basically sprint to their car. Yeah, last
Scott Frey 10:12
weekend was the Leadville 100 Ultra run. I had an athlete up there, and he was telling me how when you stand at the finish line at the Leadville 100 and you look at the people coming across the line, almost everybody sprints that last 100 meters. And what is that telling us? Well, if you ask those people, how far, how deep did you go, they’re going to tell you they went really deep and that they were at the limit before they got to the end, at least for most of them. And yet, when they see that finish line, it’s still possible to muster that sprint. And I think that’s analogous to what you’re describing,
Trevor Connor 10:48
yep. And I think you’re going to get into this, your brain is constantly processing How much more do I have to go what is ahead of me? And then it’s going to interpret how fatigued you are based on what it thinks it still has to do.
Scott Frey 11:01
Yeah, and one of the studies that I shared with the group here was a fairly recent study looking at how, if you expose someone to physical work, you physically pre fatigue them, it affects their decision making, with respect to decisions that involve taking on further effort, and that’s an issue when you’re a competitive athlete, because when do you want to put more effort into things when everyone’s feeling bad, including yourself? Yeah, I
Grant Holicky 11:31
think one of the coolest things I’ve seen in this regard is that they talk about perceived effort for the first half mile of a one mile run of a 5k run of a 10k run of a half marathon and a marathon, and the pace can be exactly the same, but that perceived effort changes based on how much further they have to go. And it’s a really interesting way to look at this. And it’s a whole nother influence on perceived effort that I don’t know, that most athletes necessarily take into consideration we think it’s a fairly constant thing. Oh, my perceived effort’s five. Well, that five may be very different when you’re rested than when you’re fatigued.
Scott Frey 12:10
Yeah. And what I like to tell athletes is we spend a lot of energy and time talking about, should we do the 3030s, should we do the 4020s? Should we do the five by five minute intervals, and those are all incredibly important, but we’re neglecting in the context of sport science, historically, but also in our applications of things, we’ve historically neglected the role of the central nervous system of the brain. And yet, I truly believe, and this is one of my motivations, for the business cerebral performance, was to try and get some of the evidence out of that scientific literature that’s called a moldering away in dusty libraries of universities that indicates there are things we can be doing to improve people’s ability to go a bit deeper. So
Trevor Connor 12:59
Brent, what’s been your experience as an athlete? I have to believe, as somebody who’s done multiple Grand Tours, when you’re on that first day, on that start line, knowing the 90 something hours that are ahead of you, there has to be some thoughts going through your head that are very different from when you’re on the start line of just a one day race. Yeah,
Brent Bookwalter 13:18
absolutely, there’s a big difference. But you know, factors like your emotional state, your level of cognitive fatigue, your general mental state, your environment, your excitement level, your motivation purpose, like they all carry into that perceived exertion. And with that, I think one of the biggest points of when we’re considering perceived exertion is that, to me, it’s a constantly evolving value, much as we could describe like our physical threshold on any given day changes, and the perceived exertion of how that feels factors into that. But on any given day, depending our moment, depending on, yeah, where you’re coming from, where you’re going, what’s been happening in your mind and in your more sentimental heart even is going to affect how your perceived exertion feels.
Scott Frey 14:03
And I think that’s really an important point Brent, because our perceived exertion is, again, what is going to regulate our output and our ability to do work. And so if it’s fluctuating in that way, that’s going to play out in the amount of work that we can handle on a given day or at a given moment. So let’s shift
Trevor Connor 14:24
gears here a little bit, and let’s give the definition of what we mean by perceived exertion. And so I think this is where we get a little sciency. And when you’re talking about in the research, what are they referring to as perceived exertion?
Scott Frey 14:38
Yeah. So there’s a long history to this, and it starts out with a guy named Gunnar borg in Sweden, and he was interested in using a well honed technique from my world called psychophysics. And psychophysics is where we try to understand our psychological perceptions of physical. Of events in the world. So in vision, you might look at the relationship between someone’s perception of the loudness of a sound and the actual decibels of the sound. And Borg took that logic to look at the relationship between perception of how hard people were working their subjective experience, how hard does it feel like I’m pushing myself relative to different measures of workload? The easiest one to think about for us is wattage. And Borg came up with a number of different approaches, and probably the most commonly known one in the most well used one, at least in the research world, is the Borg scale, which always confuses people, because it goes from a lowest intensity of six to a highest intensity of 200 and the reason it is that way is Borg tried to anchor it to average heart rates. 60 he chose is a typical resting heart rate, and 200 as like a max heart rate. And if we, of course, talked about our arresting heart rates and our max heart rates, all four of us would be very different. And so we know that that was probably a fool’s errand. In some ways, a lot of us, working with athletes, will default to using something that is easier to describe, one to 10, for example. And there are other scales with specific adjectives describing effort and so forth, where it’s very important to train people in the language in order to use them. So for practical purposes, very few people actually use them in the field. Yeah,
Trevor Connor 16:36
I can’t use that Borg scale anymore, because I now know the basis behind it. So when somebody asked me, you know what number I look down my heart rate, like 140 heart rate, 14,
Scott Frey 16:43
yeah, yeah. That kind of tosses it out the window. Trevor,
Trevor Connor 16:48
yeah. It kind of ruins it. So I did a little research coming into this episode, and found an interesting study I’m sure you’re familiar with was by a Benjamin pageau, and it’s the psycho biological model of endurance performance and effort based decision making theory to explain self paced endurance performance. And what I found really interesting is he said there’s kind of five factors that contribute to how we choose to pace ourselves. One is perception of effort. Two is potential motivation. Three is knowledge of distance or time to cover, which is that example I gave earlier. Four is knowledge of the distance time remaining, and five is previous experiences, memory of perception of effort during the exercise. And he basically says, all those are factors, but the perception of your effort just trumps everything. Yeah,
Scott Frey 17:39
I think I would tend to agree with that. And so tying this back to Borg a little bit, what Borg observed was that there wasn’t a one to one relationship between increasing workload and perception of effort. It’s an exponential relationship, and the actual functions are pretty consistent across people. It’s like for every unit of increase in workload, you get an exponential increase of about 1.7 of people’s perception of effort, and that translates across different numerical scales and so on and so forth. Like most of the psychophysical relationships between our perception and what’s happening in the world, there’s a very lawful relationship. And so how that relates to your point in terms of regulating effort, is that it is a very complex perception, this perception of effort, it involves both a knowledge of the signals that we’re sending out to our muscles that we’re using to produce the work, but also the signals that we’re sending to our respiratory muscles and our cardiac muscles, and the feedback we’re getting back from our sensory systems, interoceptors that are telling us about the thermal changes that are resulting from the work we’re doing, the acidic changes in our muscles, the actual force that is playing through our joints and our muscle spindles and so forth. And on top of that, there is all of this other cognitive stuff, because it’s not just the case that we have a motor part of the brain and a sensory part of the brain. We have this amazing neocortex that folded outer, hugely developed brain that we have as human beings, and that is dealing with all the other thoughts, interpretations and emotions around what we’re going through, and that’s an important thing to understand, because that also provides us with some levers to begin to work with if we want to start manipulating perception of effort. So
Trevor Connor 19:52
before we start heading there, you put something in the outline that I’m interested in having you explain that also part of. Definition of perceived exertion, which he called the prediction machine. Yeah,
Scott Frey 20:03
so this came up in the discussion a little bit a few moments ago. Our brain is doing kind of three jobs at once. It is dealing with all of that sensory information that we’re getting about what’s going on in our bodies, what’s going on around us, and it’s contextualizing that based on our past experiences, have we been through this before? Have we felt this way before? And it’s dealing with this other part that you pointed out in the paper, which is, what are our predictions about what’s going to happen next? And that’s a really important thing to understand. So the brain is not only regulating our behavior based on the moment we’re in and all the sensory information we’re getting, but also based on our past experiences and our expectations of the future. So if your expectation of the future is that you’re going to feel just as horrible as you’re feeling right now. What is that going to do? Well, that’s going to throw up all sorts of flags. It’s going to get the brain to really grab those brakes right. And that’s a big problem, as you well know. And you guys have more experience than I do in this in a bike race, you’re constantly going through periods where it’s super intense and you’re doing everything you can to stay in the group and not get shelled out the back. But if you start thinking it’s going to be that way for the next 15 minutes, yeah, you might well find yourself saying, the hell with this,
Grant Holicky 21:39
yeah. And I think so much of this then comes into the practical application of this, which Brent and I are spending so much time on, whether he’s in school now or me being in school in the past. But that fear or that lack of confidence, or that confidence that you may have entering into a race setting, that really is going to shift how that perceived effort ends up relaying back to your brain. And I think this is so important. The other thing I’ll extend this to is one of the things that we’ll find ourselves saying to athletes a lot, I don’t want to speak for Brent, but I’m sure he’s there, is to say, what you’re feeling is real. You are experiencing more fatigue, and you’re like you’re experiencing more pain, you’re experiencing no pain. Whatever that may be, it’s all real, but it may have the roots in past experiences and in confidence or lack of confidence, and that’s super important. I think many, many coaches and many athletes are quick to say, oh, it’s all in my head. It’s not all in your head. It’s real. You were talking about this back and forth between the brain and the body. What you’re feeling is real, but it may have its roots in other things.
Trevor Connor 22:48
So I think this is the study. There was a great study that that kind of played with this. I’m looking at this was a doctor, Paul Davis, temporal aspects of effective states, physiological response and perceived exertion and competitive cycling time trials and Brent, you’ll probably be able to talk to this, but they kind of pulled a mean trick on these athletes, where they couldn’t see any information, but they were reporting to them how they were performing. And they told one group that they were performing really well, and they told the other group they were performing poorly. Had nothing to do with how they were actually performing. They just told them this. And so one group kind of finished the time trial feeling interjected. They just didn’t perform well. The other group ended at feeling pretty great. They performed great. And then they had them come back and repeat the time trial. And what you saw was their effective state coming out of that first time trial then influenced their performance on the next one, if they were told they didn’t perform very well, they came in expecting not to perform well and didn’t perform as well. Very
Scott Frey 23:49
practical implications from that one, huh? Yeah, I
Grant Holicky 23:52
think Brent can talk about this with the director in your ear during a time trial. Is definitely
Brent Bookwalter 23:57
100% Yeah. That brings up the discussion of how feedback relates to this perceived exertion, this prediction that our brain is making on the future, and then our expectation and feedback comes in many forms. It comes in the form of the director in our ear. Comes in the form of us looking at data, biometrics that are displayed. And there’s very similar to that research, Trevor and I think even by the same authors, there’s some interesting research about the power of also not just feedback and encouragement, but deceptive feedback, and that how that can affect performance positively and negatively. And that is rooted in a lot of this brain science, as Dr Fry was just talking about. So to have a understanding of how the brain is actually working, as Dr fry is telling us. And then, yeah, the applied nature of whether it is the feedback, the expectation, the encouragement, these past experiences, it all heavily factors in. And then, without getting going too quickly to the next thing, but we. What quickly comes into my mind then is our coping strategies and our just strategy in general for dealing with this. And for me, that’s been one of the great parts about being in school now and learning about some of this research and science and digging into this, and that there are strategies with strong efficacy that we can implement now and that we can train just like we train our body, train our mind, to use these strategies which positively affect our perceived exertion and our performance.
Scott Frey 25:28
So one question I have for you, because I noticed this in the outline, you use both perceived exertion and perceived effort. Yeah, it’s very careless of me, actually. So they’re not the same thing. They’re not the same thing. And so it gets back to what I was telling you before, that the brain is taking in sensory information. We call that afferent information, coming in from all of our senses, including those within our body. And that information is really key to creating this sense that we have a perceived exertion. How hard are we working along with all of those interpretations that are sitting on top of that, perceived effort is a bit different, but people can actually respond differently to a question when you train them, what’s your level of perceived effort versus exertion? Perceived effort is the other side of that coin. How strong are the muscle contractions and the outgoing commands from the brain that are going to your respiratory muscles to your leg and arm muscles, depending on your sport. And so I think what we’re really getting at here is more of the perceived exertion, the incoming sensory information and all the interpretive stuff going on there, but there surely is a component of how hard we feel we’re working that has to do with our brain’s constant estimate of how intense those motor commands are that it’s sending out too. So it’s not that these two are completely distinct from one another, but I think the perceived exertion is more encompassing, and that’s more what we’re speaking about today. So
Trevor Connor 27:05
this gives a little more back to that whole idea of afferent and efferent, which I haven’t used in school, exactly the signals coming in versus signal going out exactly. Okay, so let’s shift gears here a little bit, and looking forward to hearing from all of you, I’m really just gonna ask questions, because the three of you, because the three of you are all experts on this. Let’s talk about things that influence perceived exertion. Influence your willingness to go hard, how hard you can go hard, and how you’re feeling about it, whether it’s killing you or seems to be manageable. And I would love to start in that kind of psycho biological side. What are the things that influence our perception? I
Scott Frey 27:43
don’t think we could have a conversation about perceived exertion without acknowledging the fact that the biggest thing that affects your perceived exertion is training. And what I mean by that is a given workload. If we fix the workload you’re doing, let’s say you’re sitting on your trainer, riding 200 watts that perceived exertion associated with that is going to be very different when you’re in condition versus when you’re deconditioned. And so the number one thing you can do to manipulate your perceived exertion is get fitter. On top of that is to acknowledge the fact that as you get fitter, what do you want to do? You don’t want to just put out 200 watts. You want to put out 300 watts, or whatever it is. You want to go faster, right? So we start to scale the amount of work output to perceived exertion as well, right? The other things that play into this, I think, a big one that sometimes surprises people, and that we work on a lot with our athletes, is mental fatigue. And we’ve known for over a century that mental fatigue, if you have someone do mentally fatiguing work exercises, that is going to compromise their ability to do physical work subsequently. And that the way that it does that, and this relates directly to the psycho biological model, is by escalating their ratings of perceived exertion. So perceived exertion is not just about the physical workload, and this is the contextualization part, right? It’s not just about that sensory information coming in, motor commands going out, but it’s about all the other things that are going on, all the other stresses that you’re under, and mental fatigue is one that is particularly interesting in this regard. We may have time to talk about it later, but there are things we can do to not only reduce that mental fatigue, to try and lower our perceived exertion for a given amount of work, and also things that we’re coming to understand that we might be able to do effectively, training systems in the brain that manage mental fatigue, that are important for physical work.
Trevor Connor 29:53
You sent all of us a great study on that, but I’m not going to bring it up yet, because we’re going to talk about it later. So here’s our teas stick around because. Was, it was a good study. We did an episode with you on pain. And something I remember from that episode, which kind of goes to what you’re talking about, the importance of training, was that endurance athletes actually don’t increase their pain threshold. They still feel all pain. But what you see in endurance athletes is their tolerance goes up, they feel the pain, but they’re just kind of whatever.
Grant Holicky 30:24
Yeah, I think that’s a crucial difference here, right? And I’m big believer in this. This is why I like to train higher end year round. We’ve talked about this, but the main reason that I want to train some of those intensities all throughout the years, I want people to feel that. I want them to understand what that is like. Again, I want them to come to terms with that. I want them to get comfortable with that feeling of being very, very uncomfortable. Because there’s something to that when you’re asked to go put out 500 watts all of a sudden and you haven’t been there, there’s a whole bunch of stuff that comes into how that feels and some of it is that it says 500 watts on your on your head unit. Some of it’s what you’re getting back in terms of your breathing, your respiration rate, your heart rate. Some of it’s coming to Now, what does that person next to me look like? That looks easy for them. That’s not easy for me. Now we start to get all of this information that comes in that’s influencing our perceived exertion, not our perceived effort. We know what our perceived effort is. We’re banging on the pedals, but that exertion of what it feels like has all of these factors into it. And I just knocked off five or six, but you can keep going. Are we on the trainer versus riding outdoors? Is it wet versus dry? Is it hot versus cold? You know, is it all of those things? Is it a good road versus a bad road? There’s people that really don’t like heavy roads. There’s people that really like fast roads. So all that information matters, and it translates to how we feel, and that’s crucial. Brett, do
Trevor Connor 32:00
you have any thoughts here? Yeah, well, the
Brent Bookwalter 32:02
idea that our cognitive load, our mental fatigue, affects our physical performance, our perceived exertion, I feel like a retired pro cyclist or retired athlete is sort of an ultimate example of that, but we all feel it. I mean the difference between waking up in the morning, throwing my best self in the beginning of the day, all my effort, with no mental load, no cognitive fatigue, into training, is so so, so different. Taking care of my two kids now, grinding my head through the school books, being an NBC Studios in the summer where I’m come out, just totally mentally fried. And then the idea to go out and try to do any sort of high intensity, it’s, I mean, I think everyone can, most people, if not everyone, can relate to that. And that’s a that’s an easily seen Case in point of what Dr fry is talking about. And that mental load definitely does affect our perceived exertion, the physical and that the discussion grant is having about the high intensity year round training. That’s a really interesting one, and I definitely agree with him and the arguments he’s making. And one of the challenges with this is doing those high intensity efforts year round, you actually need to bring a level of mental cognitive energy management and preparation to do those effectively, and then that quickly can bring us to some of the costs, the strategies, the ways that we can actually do that, but it’s very real. How are all of our energy manifests into how we feel any different effort and workout. So
Scott Frey 33:31
I think an interesting thing is how we look at tapering, and we can spend a lot of time. I think you guys have had podcasts about this, right? What does a taper look like? And all of us who are involved in these sports know something about how our bodies respond when we taper. What people often overlook is what they’re doing to taper their mental workload, and that’s a very hard thing for those of us that have are not professional athletes. We don’t have that bubble around us. And I think even for professional athletes, there’s probably a lot to be gained by thinking seriously about this. I want my athletes to be bored in the days leading into a race. And you know, I’m thinking of I’ve got an athlete now who’s on France racing a four day stage race, another athlete who just did the Leadville mountain bike race, and we had long talks about you need to be really resting the brain as much as you’re resting your legs in the days leading into this.
Grant Holicky 34:29
I think that’s an interesting point that you make about pro athletes, especially I think it’s less so for a world tour athlete that has a team and some of that support that handles logistics, but we have so many athletes now that are gravel pros or mountain bike pros or cyclocross pros, that they’re handling the logistics themselves, and that load in the days prior to racing goes dramatically up. And this is a really good moment to kind of suggest guys that needs to be done month in advance, two months. Advance. So all you’re stepping into as you’re stepping into that taper of that preparation is into the itinerary that’s already been set up. And that’s something that I think athletes have a very, very hard time with, and they tend to come a little late to it. But that can happen on a world tour team too, even packing right, even like, I gotta get my you know what, together here in the next two days, and it’s overwhelming. I’m packing for a three week stage race. What do I need to bring? And I haven’t thought it through. That really drives the cognitive load dramatically up as the physical load comes down. And okay, mental stress is physical stress. Is stress that’s not really true, but cognitive load does fatigue us dramatically, and being in that spot is important. I had a pretty dramatic
Trevor Connor 35:47
version of this experience where I spent years just as a racer, and I had a taper routine that was perfect for me. I would arrive at the start line just feeling on fire. And then I started managing a cycling team. So I was a manager rider, and those days leading up to the race, even though my training plan was identical to what I used to do, were incredibly stressful. I remember one of the riders on our team commented, Trevor, you’re always so relaxed on the start line. How do you do that? And I’m like, it’s the least stressful part of my day.
Grant Holicky 36:19
I’ve already given up.
Trevor Connor 36:22
I would notice that that even though, if you looked at my training plan or looked at my training peaks, it was identical to what I did before. I used to arrive on the start line on fire. Yeah, what I noticed when I became a team manager was I would arrive on the start line flat
Grant Holicky 36:37
Well, you know what this means. This the best piece of advice I can give to anybody, and I can say this from experience, never become a team manager if you want to keep racing.
Scott Frey 36:47
So I want to just throw this to Brent, because he shared with me his preparation. And I don’t know if you have a moment to just share this with us, Brent, but the level of detail preparing for a world tour time trial that you would develop for yourself in terms of your routine? Yeah,
Brent Bookwalter 37:04
that sort of leads us into a effective strategy for managing some of this load, preparing, automating, and that’s a version of a routine, making a routine, whether it’s a concentration routine that’s helping you really mentally get locked in, but also a logistical routine. That was one of my favorite parts about being a time trialist at the top level of the sport of cycling is you could on that day with an individual effort. You could prepare, rehearse and make a very predictable and methodical routine. And we would do that really. I would do that from the minute I woke up in the morning, from the time my alarm was set, all the way down until that second minute and second that I rolled off the ramp. So it was, yeah, what time I’m waking up, I have to be out of my room by this time. The things I’m preparing in my room before I leave, when I’m getting on the bike for my early morning ride, how those minutes are broken down at the different intensities. Account for time to check in with the mechanics. Pin my race number on, yeah, what I’m eating, a chance to sit down, visualize, prepare, work through the course, transfer info over to my director. That was all calculated, rehearsed, predicted, and the more I did that, the better I got at that. You know, it really just started like, I remember the first time I did this, it was just the actual, like, trainer on the bike portion of my warm up, minute by minute. And I just kept expanding around that to every minute and second between getting off the bike and going to the start line, and then also from waking up to, like, getting on the trainer. And automating that, making it predictable, repeatable, and something that I was very familiar with would just essentially eliminate and push out all the other mental energy, the distraction, and also become really like a rallying point of concentration and focus for when I did get distracted, I could quickly just I knew I had an actual tangible piece of paper or a document on my phone, and I could look at my watch, go straight back to the number on the on a sheet, no matter what had just distracted me. Bang, I’m back and back on track, and there I go. We want
Scott Frey 39:08
to automate everything we can to the best of our ability, because that takes this limited bandwidth of consciousness that we have. Most of us think that we’re consciously aware of everything is going around us. It’s not true. It’s demonstrably not true. Our conscious mind has a limited bandwidth. We can measure it actually in the lab we have and the more you can do things like what Brent is describing, the more we can offload things and automate things, the more of that bandwidth we have left to do what we need to do, this is reducing your mental fatigue and leaving those cognitive resources available for performing. I
Grant Holicky 39:50
think for some people, that schedule sounds overwhelming because in the moment, it feels like, Oh, God, I have so much to do. But there’s two things that Brent mentioned that. I think are really important. This took time to develop, right? And he started with a chunk that was reasonable, and then that chunk expanded out over time, as he expanded it and expanded it and expanded it. But I think the biggest thing, and I noted this earlier, is it takes preparation. This is not something that he did the night before. This is something that takes planning and preparation. And okay, I’m really gonna dial this in. And we always notice this. One of the places I always noticed this personally was racing cross Vegas, which is a cyclocross race, but it happens at 930 at night in Las Vegas. And if you’ve ever tried to race that late at night, everything in your day gets mucked up. And really the only way you can do it well is to go planning backward from the start of that race all the way through the day, because people will go back and go, Okay, eat three hours before. But then when do you eat before that? Because that’s 630 at night. Okay, now I’ve got to eat at 330 and I’ve got to eat again at 1130 and I have to eat breakfast at 830 so when do I get up? And so it’s seamless. It starts to happen this way. But as soon as you plan one chunk, like Brent’s talking about, you’re gonna plan a little bit more, and you’re gonna plan a little bit more, and you’re gonna plan a little bit more, and it makes a huge difference. I love what you said, Brent, about that touchstone, right? That ability to go back. I’m rattled. I’m out of control a little bit. Oh, I can go right back to my timeline, take a deep breath, and that deep breath is hugely important, or a pause, and then slide right back into the line.
Trevor Connor 41:34
I have a little race journal or book that I built over the years, and it has in it several pages where I detail race day. You know, here’s what I do when I get up, here’s what I do an hour before the race, here’s what I do. 45 like, everything that I do is detailed out. And it’s for exactly that reason. I don’t have to think about it. I just look at that and go, Okay, now I need to do this. Now I need to do that, and I don’t have to stress. And I
Grant Holicky 41:59
think that’s one of the hardest things about being a Team Manager. Racing over the past few years, running a team means I can’t do that. No, you can at all, because something’s going to blow up, right? Inevitable, like my racers plan blew up, so I have to go do X, Y and Z. And I can’t tell you how many times I just jumped on the bike over the last couple years and tried to race. I’d
Scott Frey 42:21
like to just say that this is, in some ways, low hanging fruit. You’re not having to go out and buy a new set of rails or cut the knobs off the center of your tires at the morning of the gravel race. These are performance gains, and the closer you are to the pointy end of things, the more these matter. Yeah, and
Grant Holicky 42:39
they’re free. They’re free.
Trevor Connor 42:41
So in a previous episode we did with you, you shared a study that I found really fascinating, where they had people doing time trials on a trainer in a lab, and they had two scenarios. One was where they could see almost no data. I think the only thing they could see was speed, and the other one, they could see all their data, power, speed, heart rate, like just gave them data overload. And the athletes, when they had the data overload, didn’t perform as well, and they showed it was because it was cognitively fatiguing on them. And what was interesting, as they got through the time trial and got more and more fatigued, they stopped looking at the data, they just subconsciously knew that’s tiring me. I can’t keep looking at that.
Scott Frey 43:22
Yeah, try it out. I can think of two athletes. One’s an ultra runner. The other is the guy I mentioned, who is racing. He’s a pro Conti racer in Europe, and we’ve done particular exercises together in training to get them to be more focused on perceived exertion and less on their head unit. And we’re seeing big dividends with that, because I think we’re lowering the demands for those cognitive resources. Pay attention to what you’re doing next time you’re doing a set of intervals. And lot of us, me included, the eyes are on the head unit. What’s my power? What’s my power? What’s my power? If you take that away and just think, Trevor, I’m older than you, but I certainly know that you also predate the power meter in terms of bug raising, and you only had perceived exertion, a lot of things. And I think we’re losing our ability to tune into that in part, because we are in this kind of data overload. So we’ll do workouts, specific workouts without data, where we gather the data, we look at it afterward, but we base them exclusively off perceived exertion, and call them blackout workouts. And I think there’s real value in honing that sense of perceived exertion, because your head unit’s not going to tell you what to do in the race, at least in a mass start bike race, you’re going to have to think that through yourself.
Grant Holicky 44:48
It’s also wrong a lot of times. I think, I think that’s one of the things that is not discussed in this nearly enough, is I can start to go through the variables on power meters, head units, different. Power meters different head units. It’s a 5% difference in power possibility from a different head unit, and that’s monumental. We start talking about this in terms of the shorter, harder efforts that I watch athletes trying to hit a number on a 22nd effort. And it takes so much effort and time to load up or ramp up, just go hard. It’s 20 seconds. Just go as hard as you can. Then look at it later. I think that’s really important. I
Brent Bookwalter 45:28
totally agree in the value of getting away from being attached to the number. And one way I love to do this during my career, was a workout similar to what Dr fry is describing, but it’s something that can be done at different levels with different physical loads and costs in terms of your training. But I would pick three perceived exertion intensities and durations, and I would do them blind at the beginning of a ride. So five minutes at rpa, three, five minutes at rpa, six, and then five minutes at nine, blinded to my power and my heart rate. Then I would take the tape off, I would look at my average after and then I would go try to repeat the power output averages that I did at those given durations. And that would give me like a sort of like rematch and reference check to my perceived exertion, and that allowed me to actually go do efforts based on perceived exertion, more as a whole workout, more accurately, more aligned. The other great thing that did for me was, when you lose your power in the race, or you lose your metrics during your performance, your time trial, I can’t tell you how many times, for a while in the data, especially, it seemed to be in Switzerland, but Swiss time trials, the way the TV signals were and the motorbikes, if you had a TV moto pull up next to you, it was something with a signal. It would short your power. So you’ve just done all this preparation and focus on looking at your number and staring in and then you’re actually on TV, which is sweet for you and your family and friends, but you can’t see your power. So it became really important to, yeah, at least be competent and capable enough to check up measure effort on perceived exertion, not being relying on the number. But that said, like in terms of the numbers, this brings me to an area of perceived exertion that I think is worth discussing, and that is our our motivation, our meaning and our purpose, and how that affects perceived exertion. And One positive aspect of these numbers of this data is that it does help us chart and track improvement. And improvement is a great sustainable strategy and motivation for making ourselves better. It’s internal. It’s introspective. We want to get better. We also have to ask why we want to get better. But it’s a powerful force to see us hitting those numbers, to see us being motivated, to see us improving. So we’re not discounting that power and that potential. We’re just saying that it’s something else. It’s in addition to to also consider the detriment that can happen. But yeah, and then in addition to the meaning and the purpose of the number, I think that’s a greater sort of area of perceived exertion that that we could discuss and go down and how that affects how we feel about efforts. Well,
Trevor Connor 48:16
Brent, I was really glad you went there. You said exactly what I was hoping you were going to say, because I remember having a conversation with Swain tough, who, like you, was a very good time trialist, and asked him how he did his pacing. And he told me he got this really old cat eye wired bike computer because all he wanted to see was cadence. So when I time trial, I just look at cadence. And he made the comment that you have these younger athletes who try to target a number, that power number, and they ultimately end up failing. And he said, When I’m on the bike, I’m targeting a feel. And it sounds like you’re saying something very similar to that, for
Brent Bookwalter 48:57
sure. And I’m not saying that the data and the numbers can also be powerful, supportive, effective and inspiring, but yeah, as Grant was saying and going on, what I said in terms of Yeah, recalibrating myself, and really having an idea of of what that feels and that even goes back to the strategic planning of pacing a pacing plan When our data scientists and our coaches would break down the pacing of a time trial based on the grade, the win, the course, my projected time, my threshold. I wasn’t just going through that and visualizing that based on what that number was that I was going to hit. I’m also thinking about how that is going to feel. So I was putting the perceived exertion that I was targeting in my pacing plan equally high, if not higher priority, than any any given data and and there’s a huge element of individuality in there. It’s going to be a little different for everyone. Just like you said, is Spain that the feeling of the cadence, the one number that he could grab a hold of and identify and attach to, that was. Cadence for some people with speed, and that takes some experimenting and figuring out
Grant Holicky 50:03
for yourself. Really quick side note, I love the fact that Brent is talking about calibrating himself. That’s essentially what’s going on when you’re doing that at the beginning of the workout. That’s a self calibration. We’d all stop and calibrate our power meter. But how often are we stopping and calibrating ourselves? And I think that’s hugely important before we get on the bike, and even at the beginning when we’re on the bike, because we may have to go out and be 5% off on our power this day, and that’s okay, you’re still training the exact same physiological zones, but it just might be different. I mean, there’s some great studies on working out in the afternoon versus working out in the morning, and which one’s better for you physiologically, feels the opposite in terms of how it feels for yourself. It’s better to work out in the afternoon, physiologically, but you tend to feel worse because of the cognitive load, and the flip flop is true in the morning. You feel better in the morning, but you’re not necessarily as ready to go.
Scott Frey 51:00
I want to just add one thing, and that’s that we shouldn’t neglect the fact that the data can be a limiter, too. So there are studies where, you know, similar to the study you described earlier, people are on the trainer, but the feedback they’re getting about their power is tweaked a little bit, or the feedback about their speed is tweaked a little bit. And what’s really interesting about that, as long as the people are unaware of it, is, you can get a little bit more out of people when they think they’re going at a pace or at a power that they had done the prior day. Say, if they think they’re racing an avatar that represents their most recent best performance, they can match that, when, in fact, that avatar might be going up to 2% faster. Now, of course, there’s a limit to that, right. None of this is magic, but again, it’s about affecting perceived exertion in order to get you a little closer to your physical capacity. If you look down and you see a big number on your meter, it may be time to dial it back. But maybe it’s not. Maybe this is your opportunity to to go better than you ever have, and the only way to really do that is, I think, to be in tune with yourself in the ways we’ve been discussing. So
Trevor Connor 52:13
what we’re getting at here is self efficacy, which came up in a lot of the studies that we’ve looked at on this. This is your sense of your ability to do the task, to accomplish the goal. And Brent, you were hitting on that. And I have a great example of this that just happened this week. I have an athlete that I’m working with. He had to take three and a half weeks off the bike, out of his control. Had to take three and a half weeks off so not nearly as fit as he was two months ago, and it is bugging him, so it’s really affecting his sense of self efficacy. So when we got him back, he’s naturally a time trial style rider, so I’m just hitting him with a couple weeks of some threshold work, because he likes it. I’m trying to get his confidence back up. But the first time he went out and did them, he was trying to hit his old numbers, the numbers he could do a month and a half ago, and failed spectacularly. And you could just see the self doubt and that just lack of efficacy. So interesting. We had to talk about that. And said, you just need to adjust the dial. You need to accept you’re not where you were two months ago. So he was doing the intervals that first time around 280 Watts and just blew up. So this week, I said, go out and do the intervals. But turn off power. Turn off everything. Just do the intervals. By feel. The last interval he did 310, 30 Watts higher,
Grant Holicky 53:36
yeah, because he was, he was convinced. And I think this comes up way more often than we we care to really understand as coaches and physiologists, and I did say physiologists, because I think the psychologist in us knows this, but three weeks off the bike isn’t a total loss of fitness. In fact, in a lot of cases, a week off the bike, two weeks off the bike, is going to be some sort of a boost in fitness, because we’ve gone through that phase of adaptation. And I think we’re so convinced, because of the athlete, because of who we are, that we want to keep doing more, we want to keep going on this, that it is going to be worse. So it is a self fulfilling prophecy, and that’s where that self efficacy falls in, for sure, and it’s really important and relevant to those athletes and and for coaches to understand that too. And
Scott Frey 54:25
it’s another example of the point we started out with, which is that it’s not that your athlete was already working at his maximal physiological capacity. He had that room to get more out of himself, and you as a good coach found a way to make that happen.
54:41
I appreciate that good
Grant Holicky 54:42
job coach.
Trevor Connor 54:43
Wow. Coming from Grant, I’ll take that good job coach. So Brent, here’s my question to you, you have lined up on the start line with literally the best cyclist in the world. That has to be a strain on your sense of self efficacy. So what? Or tools you’ve used to maintain that, oh,
Brent Bookwalter 55:02
many of them have had to use all the tricks, I think, kind of starting at the foundational piece what I just mentioned, having a strong sense of meaning, purpose, motivation for why I’m there, why I’m here. Why am I competing against these guys? What am I going to try to get out of this. What is the goal that I’m trying to accomplish? I think that is a sort of foundational piece of it. And awareness really helps facilitate a lot of the more like real time focus strategies that that can help that intimidation and help me have more belief in myself, whether that’s focusing on the process my breathing what I’m saying to myself, visualizing reliving other successful outcomes in the past, and bringing those up from my past into the present moment, those are all things that have really supported me there. And I think also going back to what we were just saying, arriving to those moments in a arrested, happy content, holistically sound, nurtured state is probably one of the biggest things I could do to give myself a chance to compete with them. And that that kind of even brings me to a mantra that I had, especially during a lot of the second half of my career, and which did help me take away some of that pressure on myself and believe in myself, was just give myself a chance to do it. I don’t have to have the expectation that I’m going to beat this best rider in the world, but I know that my best way to do that is to give myself a chance at it with all the things that are in my control. And then, who knows, maybe I can, maybe I will, and I have. So it was a combination of all that and all those things, all the strategies are, none of that happens accidentally, none of it just materialize every every one of those elements, so many steps and processes and and work put in to cultivate and create each one of those individual aspects that I just mentioned,
Scott Frey 57:04
I think that that’s an amazing window into the mind of a top world class level athlete. And I think the point you ended on Brent is really worth emphasizing. These things aren’t just natural byproducts of going out in training. This is stuff that you have shared with me over the time that we’ve worked together. You deliberately cultivated and those of us who think that it’s all about doing X workout or following the training plan, that’s incredibly important, but there’s all of this other stuff if you want to get the most out of yourself that is often overlooked, can give you a leg up on your competition, because it is so frequently overlooked and is vitally important if you really want to get the best out of yourself and something
Trevor Connor 57:56
else, Brent that I heard from you, that also is what I was reading in the research is a way to make your self efficacy more resilient. Is the focus more on the task than the result? So you know, to use a ridiculous example, let’s say you’re a cat three cyclist. You’re going to a grand fondo, and all you care about is winning that race. You line up on the start line, you look to your right and tadecha sitting beside you. Well, there goes your self efficacy, because you’re not winning that race. But if you instead, show up and focus on tasks, say, here’s what I’m going to do. Here’s, you know, I’m going to ride at the front of the group. I’m going to watch for moves. I’m going to not go with any moves early in the race, but I’ll go late in the race. I’m going to make sure I’m grabbing a bottle at every feed zone. That’s things you can control, and that helps you maintain that sense of self efficacy, regardless of who’s there. Yeah,
Brent Bookwalter 58:53
absolutely. That’s a very exemplary of process oriented goals and also the the strategic planning that you can implement as you approach a race, not just physically, and that’s that’s also the role that that some athletes, such as the ones Dr Frey was described he’s working with. That’s one of the reasons they why they implement a mental performance coach or a psychological coach, is to help develop that process and those skills ahead of time, and whether that’s actual instructional operational guidance that I’m bringing myself through, in terms of focusing on my pedal stroke, where I need to be in the bunch at different points, how I’m getting over a certain section of course, or also effectively motivational internally, in terms of motivating myself, coaching myself, and having those scripts and that dialog ready, rehearsed and really at an ultimate point, automatic, to where it becomes ingrained and automatic in me. That goes a huge way into focusing and implementing that process, as opposed to just getting stuck on the outcome at the end. Well, so. Ed, well,
Trevor Connor 1:00:00
dr, Frey, I think it’s time you sent us a really cool study. So I’m going to throw this to you. Are there ways that we can train perceived exertion?
Scott Frey 1:00:11
Yeah, and the easiest way for me to kind of begin to explain that is to introduce this idea that whenever you or I engage in a particular kind of thinking or problem solving that is happening because of activity in very specific networks in our brain. And so for the past 30 years, in running my labs and brain imaging center and so forth, we were constantly building tasks that would allow us to tax different functions, emotional functions, memory functions, decision making functions, planning, action control, all of these things, and then we could look at the biology of that using fancy brain imaging techniques. For about the last 15 years, people have been using tasks similar to the kinds of things we might use in the lab to look at decision making or attention or perception as ways of introducing a training load on some of these systems in the brain and pairing that up with physical training. The idea being that the things we’ve been discussing here today, things like your cognitive resources or cognitive reserve, might be pliable through training. And we have a lot of basic science data that we can induce changes in the brain, neuroplasticity based on training. That’s how we get better at skills. So this work is is kind of fallen into the realm of brain endurance training is one way to look at it, mental resilience training, but the basic concepts stem from what I was explaining. We give people specific loads where they’re working on tasks that require, say, demands on attention and rapid decision making, two things that are important in mass start bike racing. You’ve got to be able to make quick decisions. You’ve got to be have your attention focused, and you’ve got to respond quickly by introducing those additional mental loads in this focused way and pairing them with a person’s training, so that we’re bringing these tasks in when a person, say, is fatigued after a workout, and building it up, starting a little bit at a time, adding more load, adding more load. What we see is people get better at handling attentional demands, quick decision making and quick responses when they’re fatigued, which is exactly what we want an athlete to be able to do in an endurance race, whether it’s a cross country ski race, a running race, a mass start bike race, there’s a real advantage to having those cognitive decision making, attentional and perceptual mechanisms functioning at their highest possible level, even when we’re fatigued, it’s an advantage. And so I’m working with a number of athletes now where I’m prescribing the kinds of tasks that I used in my research career and giving them very graduated doses of these things, paired and working collaboratively, typically, with their coach, to specific workouts, to train these systems. And the concepts are exactly the things that you guys talk about. It’s progressive overload. It is periodized, it’s individualized, and it requires, also on the flip side, rest and recovery to get those adaptations. So I’m very excited about this, and I’m able to deliver these through the modern miracles of technology. I can program these up and deliver them to people’s phones or iPads so they can be anywhere working on these. And I’ve watched this research develop with some degree of skepticism for about the last 15 years, but I think the cumulative research record has reached a point now where I’m convinced that this has benefits, not just for ball sports, where this has become a bit more common, but also for endurance athletes. So I’m very excited to be able to do that Brent and I have been talking more about the possibilities of this and really beginning down this road in the context of cerebral performance.
Trevor Connor 1:04:23
So this study that you sent, there were a few things in it to me that were just jaw dropping. So this was where they were having these athletes. They would do some fatiguing work, and then they would do some mentally fatiguing work. So they would use these Stroop tasks. And anybody’s interested, I looked there’s tons of apps that you can grab that will allow you to do this. So they did need to match up. There’s other studies where they literally do the mentally fatiguing task while they’re working out. This is one just doing it after the workout, but they did this for several weeks, and then they tested time to fatigue, and the one that really. Kind of caught my attention was a 20 minute time trial, and they showed that even though there were no changes in their physiological variables, VO, two, Max lactate threshold, all that was the same. You saw an almost 20 watt increase in their 20 minute time trial, which is huge the amount of money you’d have to spend on a set of wheels to get that sort of performance increase, and this wasn’t physiological. This was just this, these mental tasks were changing their perception of exertion. It just didn’t seem as hard. Yeah, and
Scott Frey 1:05:31
I’m just going to be a stickler here and say it absolutely was physiological. It’s brain physiology. But yes, for sure, and the findings are pretty compelling, and one or two of those studies. Being a career scientist doesn’t get me very excited, but when I start to see dozens of these studies coming through over, as I said, like the last 15 years, I think the cumulative research record suggests to me, it’s prime time. So we’re just kind of moving into this application now, and it’s very exciting. And again, it relates to the whole theme of our conversation today, because what we’re doing there is getting more out of people by manipulating perceived exertion. They’re doing more work for less perception of exertion.
Brent Bookwalter 1:06:18
Yeah, it’s one of the things that’s interesting. Maybe to clarify is, I think early in this conversation, we’re talking about the detriment that cognitive load mental exertion can have on performance. But now is what we’re learning is that when it’s targeted and designed and prescribed at the right moment in the right way, it’s working in those same circuits to actually enhance performance. So in every way that it can, it can be a challenge and detriment to performance. These studies, like Dr Frey is saying, are very, very interesting now is because if we’re using that same system at the right moment in the right way, we can get an added layer of performance. And that the added benefit to me, like, what’s really exciting as an athlete is you’re not adding extra strain to your metabolic system. You’re not adding extra strain to your musculoskeletal system. You’re not on the bike anymore. It’s another example of this area in our head being this untapped resource for performance, whether we’re getting that with some of the more qualitative strategies or the more brain science strategies that Dr Frey is talking about. To me, the merging of the two of those areas is really the path to enhanced performance for so many of us.
Scott Frey 1:07:27
Yeah, structured, consistent, progressive. Well, guys, I
Trevor Connor 1:07:31
hate to say it, but I think it’s time to start wrapping up. I feel like we only just started this conversation, so hopefully we can potentially continue it at some point, but about ready for our take homes. Before we do that, here is our question for the forum. We’ll put this up. Please come and give us your thoughts and your answers. And the question is, how much do you focus on your perceived effort during races and workouts, and have you found ways to alter your perceptions? Looking forward to hearing those Yeah. So please, guys come and check out what our listeners have to say. And with that time for our take homes, you guys both know the routine here. You got about a minute to give us what you think is the most salient thought from the episode. Who would like to go first? The two of you? Well,
Scott Frey 1:08:16
I think beauty before age. So Brent should go first. I
Brent Bookwalter 1:08:21
think the biggest point with all of this goes in line with success does not happen by accident, as we all know, you wouldn’t be listening to this podcast. We wouldn’t be working with coaches and trying to understand our bodies more if we weren’t trying to get better, to improve, to enjoy more. And that takes focused work in specific areas. And yeah, for me, personally, right now, my my passion is in this realm, in this area of the potential of our minds and working on them, but it needs to be deliberate. It’s not going to happen by accident, and in most cases, just like I did, we need we need people to help us to learn, to educate and figure out to apply. So I would say this podcast, this conversation, I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s been a great first step in getting some of that understanding awareness and education, and hopefully I look forward to connecting with some of the listeners further and how to apply and learn and grow.
Scott Frey 1:09:16
The brain is a trainable system, and we need to take that seriously and not just be focusing on our legs and our lungs, but developing the mental side of things, and an important component of that is really developing our sense of perceived exertion and also taking seriously things like reducing mental fatigue or training the systems that are involved in the creation of perceived exertion in order to get ourselves a bit closer to what the physiological limits are on our capacity at whatever point in life we may be pursuing these sports. I
Grant Holicky 1:09:56
think my take home is a take home slash pet peeve. And one of the things that always jumps out at me whenever we have Dr Frey on is this is hard science. This is physiology. And I think so often when we talk about the mental side of sport, it gets cast off a little bit as well. That’s psychology, or that soft science. Or how much does that really matter? Where is the relevance? And to me, the research keeps showing this to us, and what the stuff that you guys are doing keeps bringing it to the fore. This is measurable, this is consistent, it’s trainable. And when you bring those factors into the equation, it’s something that we have to be looking at just as solidly and just as seriously as we’re looking at all the other pieces of the puzzle. And I think there’s a lot of coaches and athletes out there that are focused on the physiology first, forgetting that this is physiology. This is hard science. The ability to train your brain is really important,
Trevor Connor 1:10:54
so trying to think of how to best Express mind. But I’m going to go back to again, a study that you shared with us about pain, that the endurance athletes just had this better ability to say, you know, I’m feeling the pain, but whatever. And what they continued to say in that study was you saw an endurance athlete, elite endurance athletes just an extraordinary tenacity and grit. And they did point out that they were able to take that tenacity and grit and apply it outside of cycling as well to the rest of their lives. And that kind of goes back to something I was hinting at the beginning of this episode, which was the lesson my dad shared with me, of you’re going to learn skills that you can apply to life. And I to me, you know, we’re trying to make this case that this is hard science, that this is important stuff, and people are always going or whatever. There’s nothing wrong with me. But you know, we all obsess what’s our 20 minute power? But unless you’re a professional cyclist, your 20 minute power really doesn’t have that much application to anything else you do, but this stuff, your ability to maintain self efficacy, grit, tenacity. These are skills you can learn through sport that are going to help you, not only in sport, but everything you do. So in a lot of ways, I’m going to say what we’ve been talking about here are the most important skills that you’re ever going to get from this show. So guys, thanks for coming and sharing them.
Scott Frey 1:12:17
Thank you. Appreciate it
Brent Bookwalter 1:12:19
been a pleasure. That was another episode
Trevor Connor 1:12:21
of fast talk, the thoughts and opinions. Of stress and fast talk are those of the individual. Subscribe to fast talk wherever you prefer to find your favorite podcast, be sure to leave us a radiant review. As always, we love your feedback. Tweet us at fast talk labs. Join the conversation at forums dot fast talklabs.com or learn from our experts@fasttalklabs.com for Dr Scott fry Brent folk, Walter and grant holicy. I’m Trevor Connor. Thanks for listening. You.
