3 Mental Tricks to Ride Better

How to use your head to pedal faster.


Selene Yeager |

How to use your head to pedal faster.By Selene Yeager

PHOTOGRAPH BY JESSE LENZ
Image By Jesse Lenz

 

Some mind games can actually help your training.

Cyclists often talk about having “good legs” or “bad legs” to describe any given race or ride. But evidence is mounting that the muscle between our ears holds just as much, if not more, power over how well we’re going to turn our pedals. Research shows that when your head is tired, your legs are too. Likewise, when your brain is revved up, you can go further than your legs might have you believe. Here are three ways to train your brain so you have “good legs” on every—or at least most every—ride.

Recharge Your Noggin

Mental fatigue makes physical exertion feel harder. No kidding, right? But most of us still don’t really appreciate how a taxing day on the job can slow us down on the bike. A few recent studies put it in perspective. One from 2009 found that cyclists could hold 80 percent of their peak power for 12 minutes and 34 seconds during a time trial test when mentally fresh, but for only 10 minutes and 40 seconds (that’s a 16 percent decline) when their brains were fatigued. Most recently, a study in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise found that runners ran considerably slower after taking a series of mentally taxing tests compared to when they just chilled out with a movie for the same amount of time. Of course, most of us aren’t sitting around watching “The Hangover” at our day jobs. So what to do?

When you’re mentally fatigued, your exercise effort feels harder, explains study author Mitchell Smith of Australia’s University of Technology. “Anything that reduces perception of effort should combat these negative effects.”

If it’s not too late in the day, a little java could help. Caffeine gives your brain a jolt and helps exercise feel easier. Personally, I like to fire up one of my go-to iPod playlists, which is like audio espresso and energizes me nearly instantly. “Another simple strategy is positive self-talk,” says Smith. A 2014 study found that cyclists reported significantly lower levels of perceived exertion and pedaled an average of two minutes longer during an endurance test when they simply gave themselves a little pep talk. Feeling a little draggy? Cue up your favourite Spotify tracks, maybe grab a little joe, and say, “You’ve got this.”

See Yourself Getting Stronger

When you first start riding, you make big gains fast. The same is true for strength training and most physical exercise. It’s not that you grow muscles or build vast capillary beds overnight; it’s because you make neuromuscular adaptations pretty quickly. Put simply: your brain communicates with your muscles more effectively and efficiently, leading to better strength and performance before you really build any muscle.

Turns out you don’t even need to move those muscles to get some of these benefits. That’s right. By just using your brain, you can improve your ability on your bike. Take two studies as evidence. One from a few years back found that volunteers who just imagined exercising their biceps five days a week for 12 weeks improved their strength by more than 13 percent, though they never actually moved a muscle, while those who did no imaginary exercise reaped no strength gains. Another study published last month in the Journal of Neurophysiology involved a group of men and women who wore wrist casts for four weeks. Half the group was told to perform imaginary strength training with their wrists five days a week, while half did nothing special. At the end of the study, the visualisers lost half as much strength as those who were immobilised and did no imaginary exercise.

Sean McCann, PhD, a sports psychologist with the US Olympic Training Center, explains it best, “When you visualise an action, your brain maps it out in your body so your muscles are primed to perform,” he says, noting that he often has athletes “train” through injuries using this type of visualisation. Personally, I use visualisation to prompt my muscles into action before any difficult task. Before doing pull-ups, for instance, I’ll imagine my lats and biceps and deltoids lighting up and firing in a beautifully synchronised feat of strength. Before races or hard training rides, I picture myself starting strong, pedaling fluidly, and effortlessly getting out of the saddle to charge up steep pitches or clear challenging obstacles. Does all this make me bionic? Nope. But I do believe it helps me ride and race better.

Encourage Yourself

A recent study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience found that cyclists pedaled three to five minutes longer when happy subliminal messages like smiley faces and positive action words like “Go” were flashed on a screen in the lab than when sad faces and negative words popped up.

Aside from trying to pull off this trick with some Google glasses (please don’t), there’s no real-life application of this research yet. But I believe that non-subliminal messages help too. Try taping motivational phrases or photos to your top tube. During a long race, I’ll cut out the course profile and draw little stars and happy faces and jot down a word of encouragement or two for myself at key points along the way. I’d be lying if I said it always made me faster or stronger. But it does make me smile, and that never fails to make even the hardest ride feel easier.

 

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