An avalanche of emails. An overload of information. A meeting schedule that leaves you exhausted. Ever more change and uncertainty. The occasional win just to keep you going. If this sounds like your average day at work, you’ve stopped at the right blog!
Neuro Athletics and it’s method will help you work smarter, be more focused and productive, stay cool under pressure, reduce the length of meetings, and even tackle the hardest challenge of all: influencing other people.
As the founder of Neuro Athletics I will let you in on a little secret, you can transform your performance by training your brain. It’s not rocket science and it’s definitely not a hidden secret that only elite olympic athletes can use. I know a lot about how easily brains can get overwhelmed, so I have no intention of drowning you in complicated science here. Instead, in this short PART I article, you’ll get to know your brain in a way that brains like to learn; by watching the attached video.
Let’s raise the curtain and begin the show!
See video here:Louisa Ball Toss
More people than ever are being paid to think, instead of just doing routine tasks. Yet making a complex decisions and solving new problems is difficult for any stretch of time because of some real biological limits on your brain. Surprisingly, one of the best ways to improve mental performance is to understand these limits and how to train them. You may be someone who experiences anxiety, shortness of breath, negative thoughts, drowsiness or you maybe like 99% of the population where you cannot focus on anything for longer than 40 seconds. Am I right? I am fortunate enough to have stumbled across FITLIGHT, which is speed and cognitive training system that’s designed to completely transform the way we exercise, train, and measure performance. As a neuroscientist, I am always looking for data-driven results so be able to accurately measure the input and output of my clients.
I gained a lot of traction with this system by using it to cognitively to train my corporate athletes – I call my corporate clients athletes because I believe that every person has the ability to think, act, train, compete and attain results like an athlete.
Here’s the truth…
Thinking requires so much energy. Making decisions and solving problems relies heavily on a region of the brain called the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The cortex is the outer covering of the brain, the curly grey stuff you can see in pictures of brains. It’s a tenth of an inch thick and covers the brain like a sheet. The PFC, which sits behind the forehead is just one part of the overall cortex, and being so important, it has its limitations. One of the reasons for the prefrontal cortex’s space limits comes down to the principle of competition. The brain cannot think or hold too many concepts at a time so it becomes a competition of what concept will stay within the brain at a given time. So lucky for me, I figure out a way to train the PFC and the results were incredible. My clients were feeling stronger, healthier, and able to make more intelligent decisions at a faster rate. I was hungry for more information and that is when I discovered FITLIGHTS.
When we talk about cognitive training, such as that done with the FITLIGHTS, the improvement isn’t coming from making the brain bigger, but from improving the efficiency of sub-skills- such as getting information and ordering it in a way that is better managed by the brain to be able to communicate it for effectively.
Why am I so fascinated by this?
Well, you see, the PFC, if trained well, can help you make faster, sharper, and more accurate decisions. One piece of the Neuro Athletic method trains this part of the brain and we use FITLIGHTS and other modalities to do it!
The wireless, RGB LED powered lights that are included in the FITLIGHT training system are used as targets for the user to deactivate as per the reaction training routine. From this, various measurements of the user’s performance are captured for immediate feedback and can be used for future training sessions.
Why I use FITLIGHT for increasing mental performance
There is one main reason clients come to Neuro Athletics and that is to perform better and think faster so we use specialized training tools to help them achieve this in a fun and innovative way.
In the video attached, you can see that we are using the lights along with a set of handballs that are used primarily to stress the neural system of the athlete. Just like your body and your muscles, your brain (mainly the PFC needs to be stressed). By consistently training the neural system and overloading it with routines that deliberately train, track and measure the output of the brain, we are able to grow and strengthen the pathways within the brain which in turn enables it to perform better. This is PART I of a series of blogs I intend to put out that demonstrates the effectiveness of cognitive-based training actives and how it can help you in any area of life. Remember, exercises for rebuilding your brain can be as simple as a few moments of focused attention just before a meal. Repetition is key. May your abilities to watch your brain at work keep you fascinated until our last breath!