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Research Hit: Brain Endurance Training For Elite Athletes and Healthy Aging
How Brain Endurance Training, developed for elite athletes, boosts healthy aging
What, “brain endurance training” is a thing?
Yes, and, interestingly, this was not developed to help the aging population or to improve cognitive skills in general such as many cognitive games are. You know the type of thing, apps with different types of cognitive and memory tasks.
Yes, I have various apps — but how is this used in elite athletes, first of all?
Yes, this is interesting. As an active athlete that reads a lot of the science and research, I can answer that. When you do various exercises particularly at high intensity you get what is known as Central Nervous System fatigue. Basically your nervous system, of which the brain is the central hub, fatigues and this contributes to lower performance. This also means that if you use the brain a lot during exercise, which might be in many tactical sports, your performance may drop more.
A number of years ago a few researchers then experimented with combining exercise with cognitively challenging tasks to train the brain and central nervous system to better deal with stress — or to produce higher performance during competition when…
