NORTH East sports scientists believe they have discovered a training technique that could convert top 10 finishes to Olympic medals.
Deceiving the brain can lead to an improvement of up to 5% in sporting performance, according to new research from Northumbria University.
Academics believe the discovery could have a significant impact on Team GB’s chances in the London 2012 games next summer in events including cycling, rowing and marathon running.
In a research project, trained cyclists were asked to race against a computer-generated model on a screen, which they believed was moving at the rate of the cyclist’s personal best.
However, the avatar was actually travelling at a speed 1% faster than the human cyclist’s record time over 4km.
Despite this, the athletes, who could also see themselves as an avatar cycling the virtual course, were able to match their opponent, going faster than they ever had before.
Researchers believe this is because there is a reserve of energy production that can be tapped into, even in well-trained athletes.
Sports and exercise professors are convinced that training the body to access these energy reserves “could make the difference between a gold medal and finishing fifth”.
“In elite sport, that 1% advantage, that 1% increase in speed is quite substantial,” said Prof Kevin Thompson, head of Sport and Exercise Sciences at Northumbria University, who carried out the research along with PhD student Mark Stone.
“We feel that this system is conservative and even in well-trained individuals, who have a well-developed pacing template, there is a reserve of energy production that can be utilised to further enhance performance.
“These findings demonstrate a metabolic reserve exists which, if it can be accessed, can release a performance improvement of between 2% and 5% in terms of their average power output.
“At elite level sport, even an increase of 1% in average speed can make the difference between somebody being placed in a race or not.”
Prof Thompson said that, in training, the mind anticipates the end of a bout of exercise in order to set an initial pace.
Sensory receptors, which monitor the body’s responses, feed this information back to the brain, allowing it to control the body’s resources to last until the end of the exercise to avoid damage.
The study found that adding a competitive opponent to motivate participants to access this reserve was not effective when the participant was aware that their opponent was exercising at a power output 2% or 5% greater, but was effective when participants had been lied to.
