The Central Governor hypothesis proposes that our brains ultimately governs how hard we're willing to ride, so it makes a great target for manipulating to improve our performance. So how might we practically use this ability to ride faster?
My last article I discussed the importance of the psycho-physiological relationship in determining performance. Ultimately, the main tenet of the "central governor hypothesis" is that the brain and body rely on both physiological cues (e.g. lactate levels, muscular fatigue, temperature) and also psychological cues (e.g. motivation, knowledge of performance, self-confidence, distance to finish) to regulate how hard we're willing to ride at any point in time.
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Physiologically, we might achieve this by keeping our neck and head area cooler through the use of ice socks or pouring cool water over our heads. This can help to fool our brain into thinking it's cooler than it really is, which may help us be willing to ride harder (This can be risky at the extremes of hot temperatures, as this might lead to working too hard and risking heat illness, so be careful and use common sense).
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Psychologically, one way to "rig" the central governor is through different sport psychology interventions, which I will leave to Jim Taylor and our other Toolbox crew. The other way is through altering your real-time feedback so that you believe you're performing different than reality.
We dissected an article in my last article where the focus was on lying to the participants that they were going faster or slower than they actually were. In large part, the results were inconclusive and did not find any difference between the accurate, faster lying and slower lying conditions. The basic conclusion then is that it doesn't matter what you tell your athlete about how they're performing, because they will only ride to their own desires and self-knowledge.
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But as expected, it's rarely as simple as that, and it may still be possible to trick your brain.
In the March 2012 issue of Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, a UK group tested whether you can gain improved performance by chasing someone who's going faster than you realize (Stone et al. 2012).
The analogy to think of is seeing a rider in the distance ahead of you. That innate competitive nature we have as cyclists and athletes can drive us to ride faster than we think possible in order to chase down that rider.
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With that general idea or context in mind, let's check out the study details:
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So the basic goal or thrust of the study is to see whether, when the focus was externalized towards an opponent, the competition can draw out a stronger ride. In comparison, the Wilson et al. (Wilson et al. 2012) study I discussed before was more of an internal challenge and manipulation without the same competition focus. So, what happened when deception and racing against someone was tested?
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This is interesting in that the improved competition provided by the presence of an avatar, and also a faster avatar drove the participants not only to a higher power output but also a higher perceived effort. So here is excellent proof that competition pushes us—willingly—to harder efforts than we'd be able to ride solo.
This also supports the contention that better competition pushes us harder. Furthermore, this suggests that we all have a latent physical reserve that only gets really tapped when we become highly motivated, such as when we're competing.
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There are some big messages from this study, which I have hinted at above:
Ride fast and have fun!
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