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Outside Magazine September 2003

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BODYWORK: Meshing Mind and Muscle
Head Strong
Beta-tested by Olympians and elite athletes, the wizardry of neuromuscular training will hardwire you for peak performance

By Ben Hewitt


	Programmed to hammer: debug your mind and your muscles will follow. (Dan Winters)

MAYBE YOU'RE PRETTY FAST on a bike—speedy enough to entertain hopes of winning a district championship with the help of a training regimen borrowed from Lance & Co. You've got a heart-rate monitor, and you spent last winter grinding through long, slow, base-training rides, thinking that this would prepare your cardiovascular system for intense summer efforts. But as you plowed through freezing rain, did you ever second-guess your methods?

You should have. There's another way to reach peak shape. It's called neuromuscular training, and it can have you ready for a century ride or a triathlon in as little as six weeks. Cutting-edge fitness research has uncovered a network connection between your brain, your muscles, and your athletic performance, and the findings are a boon to time-strapped endurance athletes pushing for personal bests.

"Strength is speed-specific," says Owen Anderson, running coach, exercise physiologist, and editor of Running Research News, a newsletter that covers the sport's most recent theories. "If you're training slowly, you'll be strong at those slow speeds, but not at the higher speeds you need to compete. If you want to be a faster athlete, it's crazy to practice being a slow one." The 56-year-old Anderson is a leading member of a tiny but growing faction of coaches and world-class athletes focused on exploiting the unconscious link between your brain and your muscles. The former tells the latter what to do: Program the right pace, and, according to the neuromuscular fitness philosophy, you'll run, bike, or swim as quickly as you've conditioned yourself to go.

For neuromuscular training, two things matter: one, that you work out at the level at which you plan to compete, and two, that you teach your brain to anticipate—and work through—the burning in your muscles that accompanies intense effort. The payoff is much less time spent achieving a competitive level of fitness. How much time will you save? Try months.

Case in point: Mark Carroll, a 31-year-old Irish middle-distance running champion who finished sixth in last year's New York City Marathon, his first 26.2-mile event. He credits his performance to an 11-week regimen of targeted race-pace training, which he picked up from Anderson's July 2001 article in the British newsletter Peak Performance. For the marathon, Carroll focused on 20-mile runs every other week, with shorter runs in between, all completed at, or seconds off, his eventual race pace of five-minute miles.

"Most runners train really long and slow," Carroll says of the six-month training schedules maintained by some elite marathoners, "but it's junk."

"Think about your goals," advises Anderson. "If you're training for a 25-mile time trial on a bike, train at that distance, train that intensity, so that your neuromuscular system will know exactly what to expect."

It's an idea already embraced by many Olympic-level athletes, according to Jon Schriner, medical director of the Michigan Center for Athletic Medicine. "It just hasn't trickled down to everyone else yet," he says.

Before you go from 5K runner to marathoner lickety-split, you'll have to address the second tenet of neuromuscular training: teaching your mind to push through pain, because—we won't lie to you—there's a lot of it. Your goal is to channel the toughness of an athlete like Lance Armstrong, who's legendary for tolerating quad-searing efforts more stoically than any cyclist in the world.

"When your brain registers fatigue as a sensation, you typically make a subconscious decision to slow down," says Tim Noakes, a professor of sports science at the University of Cape Town, in South Africa, who's researching the relationship between the brain and athletic performance. "Our studies show that your muscles aren't as tired as you think."

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