Improving your cognitive functions to improve your sporting performance: winning combo?

Let's start at the beginning, returning for just a few moments to the definition of cognitive functions?

We all know that these are the capacities of our brain allowing us to interact with our environment. They help us, among other things, to perceive, concentrate, acquire knowledge, adapt, reason and interact with others.

According to the literature, they can be grouped into different categories: attention, language, memory, executive functions, visuospatial functions and social cognition. To increase the performance of our sports patients, we tend to concentrate retraining on motor functions.

What if the key was also to exercise cognitive functions?

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‍Every good athlete knows that it is not enough to only train muscular strength or proprioception to become a high-level athlete. Many disciplines require a multitude of skills such as adaptation, organization, planning and anticipation to position yourself correctly in the field in response to actions taking place in real time.

Decisions must be made very quickly to anticipate the reactions of opponents, variations in terrain and more generally anything that disrupts the course of action. All of this requires sustained concentration and attention.

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The team of Lucia et al. was interested in this subject. Their study demonstrates that training combining a motor task and cognitive work can improve the sporting performance of players. [1] Here, two groups of basketball players were compared.

One followed classic sports training (participation in matches and on-field training) for 5 weeks.  

While the other group followed the same program by adding 2 sessions of 30 min. cognitive-motor training. This training consisted of adding a cognitive task while the player dribbled. The second group showed a 17% increase in results on specific sports tests. A literature review studying the effects of dual-task training concluded that this promotes the development of working memory and therefore improves the motor and cognitive abilities of athletes in the long term.

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[2] Duchène et al. (2016) studied two groups of hockey players. The results are as follows: perceptual-cognitive training makes it possible to reduce the cognitive load on motor performance by allowing faster movement without altering it.[3]

All this research tends to prove that improving our cognitive abilities is an equally interesting way to improve our sporting abilities and performance.

Although they are not recent (some research on the subject was funded by NASA in 1998 [4].), and increasingly numerous, they do not yet make it possible to define the optimal training modalities. It is clear that the human brain has not yet revealed all its secrets…

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Virtual Reality: A lever for sports performance

One of the interesting ways to implement this winning cognitive-motor combination as part of a rehabilitation protocol would be to use Virtual Reality (VR).

The basis of VR is to act by soliciting attention and concentration. Feedback from practitioners already equipped with a VR system shows that it increases people's engagement in the exercises, their motivation [5] and the intensity of the session.

A 2019 study carried out on karatekas has also demonstrated that integrating VR into the daily practice of the athlete was useful to improve the recognition of the type of attack of the opponent, athletes could thus anticipate and improve their response time and decision-making. Where other studies only assumed an increase in motivation, Petri et al. (2019) statistically proved this motivational increase. The enthusiasm came from the fact that fighters could try new movements and reactions in a safe environment [6]. In addition to the immersive dimension perceived as fun by patients, VR makes it possible to work on dual tasks or inhibition while by carrying out motor work.

A study on elderly subjects demonstrated that VR training was more effective than traditional training. [7] The IADL, a questionnaire allowing an assessment of activities of daily living, was significantly improved in the VR group compared to the control group. The latter trained in a more traditional way, by performing squat exercises, sitting/standing, walking routes, muscle strengthening and by adding a double task, changing the instructions or adding memory work. In addition to the work functional, the different possible settings of the VR software allow true real-time adaptation of the patient's exercise conditions [8]. T

he multitude of environments and exercises makes it a tool that offers almost unlimited possibilities for working on the different aspects of rehabilitation or sports retraining. The fields of application are vast and still to be discovered. In summary, adding cognitive work, carried out in VR, to the rehabilitation protocol should make it possible to improve the motor skills of patients as well as their sports performance.

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Bibliography :

_{[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35053809/Brain Sci. 2021 Dec 31;12(1):68. doi:10.3390/brainsci12010068.
[2] https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/4/1732. The Acute and Chronic Effects of Dual-Task on the Motor and Cognitive Performances in Athletes: A Systematic Review .Int. J.Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18(4), 1732; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18041732
[3] Duchêne, S.(2016). Conception et validation d’un protocole d’entraînement pour réduire l’impact d’une tâche perceptivo-cognitive sur la performance motrice. (Mémoire de maîtrise inédit) Montréal : École de technologie supérieure.
[4] Dennis K. A. & Harris, D. (1998). Computer based simulation as an adjunct to Ab Initio flight training. The International Journal of Aviation Psychology, 8(3): 261-277.
[5] Petri, K., Masik, S.,Danneberg, M., Emmermacher, P. & Witte, K. Possibilities to use a virtual opponent for enhancements of reactions and perception of young karate athletes. Int. J. Comput. Sci. Sport 18, 20–33 (2019)
[6] Article de Presse paru dansl’Indépendant 21/01/21 : La réalité Virtuelle au service de la Rééducationà Port-La-Nouvelle (https://bit.ly/3dpI4Mq)
[7] Ying-Yi Liao 1, Han-Yun Tseng 1, Yi-Jia Lin 2, Chung-Jen Wang 3, Wei-Chun Hsu 4 Eur J Phys Rehabil Med ; Using virtual reality-based training to improve cognitive function, instrumental activities of daily living and neural efficiency in older adults with mild cognitive impairment , 2020Feb;56(1):47-57. doi: 10.23736/S1973-9087.19.05899-4.
[8] Article paru dans le Républicain 19/10/21 – A l’hôpital, la réalité virtuelle au service de la rééducation des patients (https://bit.ly/3mQVPaI)}