I want to talk today about improving brain function along with movement at the same time. As people are getting older across the world, we’re seeing more and more interest in cognitive training or cognitive retraining. So if someone’s had a brain injury, maybe they’ve lost some cognitive capacity of when or retrain it.
Plus we have a whole aging group of people who go, you know what? I just don’t want to lose my ability to use my brain effectively. And so over the last probably two decades, we’ve seen a lot of brain training games come out and people are told, you know, do crossword puzzles and do Sudoku’s and do all that kind of stuff.
And that’s great. But as a brain-based movement company, we want you to understand that the research on that is, uh, not great sometimes. It’s a little bit limited in that we see people, you know, they practice certain games or certain cognitive puzzles, and they get better at doing that puzzle, but they often lack transfer of those skills into the rest of life. And so one of the things we’ve been looking at intensely for the last probably decade is, how does cognitive training blend with movement training? Because honestly, moving is one of the most complex things that we do, particularly whenever it’s goal focused, or I’m trying to play a sport, or I’m trying to even just go in the garage and organize things.
All of this is really important for us to understand that thinking and moving together It’s often more challenging than most people believe. And whenever we see cognitive decline, that’s one of the first problems, is that thinking while moving becomes more and more challenging. So we’re going to start a little series on cognitive training with movement.
Today we’re going to talk about inhibition. Whenever we look at the human brain, one of its most important roles, particularly the frontal lobe, which is our kind of more human part of our brain, if you want to call it that, it’s the home of what’s called executive function. And executive function is what allows us to concentrate, do good long term planning.
It plays a big role in memory, also plays a huge role in movement. But what we’d like people to understand is that one of its primary jobs, if not its primary job is inhibition. And when we say inhibition, what that means is that the human brain left to its own devices without some inhibitory control can do some really crazy things.
Many of the things that are bothersome to us as human beings. Potentially painful, potentially dangerous come about because we lack inhibitory control. So there are a couple of really well known exercises that you can do to work on inhibition.
Inhibition basically means I need to be able to see something and rather than having an automatic reflexive response to it. I need to be able to think it through and make a better response. If you’ve ever had a conversation that went wrong, you know what I’m talking about, right? Sometimes the first thing you want to say is the wrong thing to say. Sometimes the first movement you want to make is the wrong movement. So that’s why we want to focus on this.
The tool that we’re going to use today is called a Stroop test. Now, my computer printer broke, so I made you one by hand. And the Stroop test probably you’ve seen it before, but it’s super easy. The basic idea is that whenever I show you colors, but I’ve written the colors out, because we have so many repetitions of reading, when we look at something like this, we would see red, yellow, blue, black, and purple.
The Stroop test, however, requires you to see the word, to ignore the word, and tell us what color the ink is. So in this particular case, this one’s, this is, the same, right? Synonymous. So I have the word red written in red ink over here. I have the word yellow written in purple ink. So when you’re doing the Stroop test, you have multiple versions of it.
Now, what I’ve done, we’ve prepped a video for you. It’s going to play after I get done describing this. It is a one minute. Stroop test. All right, and you’re going to do three different versions of it. Basically what’s going to happen is a word is going to come up on the screen. And the first time you go through it, one minute, I want you to read the word as written, right?
So if it says yellow, it’s written out, say yellow, then rewind. The second time you go through it, you’re going to do the actual Stroop work, which is you’re going to be staring at the screen and whatever word pops up, I want you to tell yourself or say out loud the color of the ink in which the word is written. That doesn’t sound terribly challenging, but when the speed increases, it actually is way harder than it sounds, and it requires you to inhibit the desire to read the word.
And instead focus on the color. In the third version, you’re going to now blend this with movement and you’re going to see for yourself how much harder it is to inhibit while we’re also moving at the same time, right? Thinking while moving. You can do this in a lot of different ways. You can simply set your computer up,, whenever you hit go, the Stroop task will begin and you can just be doing body weight squats while you are seeing a word flash up.
You’re reminding yourself. Hey, don’t read the word, focus on the color of the ink and say that out loud. You could be doing pushups. If you put it on your iPad, you can be doing pushups when you do it. I don’t really care what you do. You can be doing just some kind of complex motor control exercise. Maybe you’re doing a shoulder figure eight on one side, but I want you to do something that’s semi challenging from a movement perspective so that you force yourself to also maintain cognitive inhibition, while you’re under physical stress.
This is a really, really powerful tool. And one of the things that we have found again over the last decade or so is that if we wanted to continually progress, our clients. We couldn’t just have them do mobility drills and strength drills and speed drills and pain relief drills. We had to begin coupling that with cognitive training at the same time in order to get greater transfer and have a bigger effect on their lives.
So this is not something that you do occasionally. Once you begin learning this, this is something that you should inject into every single training session. What you will find is it’s much harder. You’ll get tired much faster. But the impact, the results are huge.
I did a course last year called No More Mindless Mobility. And the whole point of that class was to say, you know what, every form of exercise, we can improve the results by placing cognitive demands in the midst of that process. I think you’ll really enjoy it.
The last comment here is you’re probably going to get frustrated, especially as the speed increases or the challenge increases. And that’s good. Frustration is a part of the cognitive training process because you have to inhibit that. You have to inhibit that frustration to drive yourself to continue doing the work. Sometimes results require effort, and when you start building cognition and movement together you’re going to really experience that for yourself.
Alright, so this video, number one, we have a few more coming up for you, with regards to cognitive training stuff that you can immediately implement, into your sessions with your athletes and for yourself. If you are a movement professional and you’re interested in blending cutting edge neuroscience into what you do, check out our free mini course, look at the thousand million blogs we have here. Also we recommend you subscribe to the channel because we put stuff out every week. So hopefully you can kind of figure out if this resonates with you and would be a nice blend of what you’re already great at. All right. Thanks.
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