Brain Endurance Training Could Give You the Edge You’re Looking for in Performance

If there were a way to improve your cycling performance without putting more stress on your body, would you use it? This isn’t a trick—we aren’t talking about illegal substances. Instead, we’re referring to brain endurance training (BET), a way to teach your brain to not get in the way of your cycling goals. You can ride longer and harder, as long as you have the brain power to do it.

Based on Professor Samuele Marcora’s study of fatigue during endurance exercise, BET supports your brain in not giving up. That’s because, according to the research, your perception of your effort may limit your athletic performance more than true physiological exhaustion.

In other words, your brain, not your body, may be the primary limiter of your performance. Fortunately, BET might be key to pushing past that mental barrier. Here’s everything you need to know about how to use it to your cycling advantage.

The concept is simple: Just like you train your muscles to become stronger and train your lungs to increase their oxygen capacity, brain endurance training teaches your brain to be more resilient to fatigue.

During a BET session, athletes complete both cognitive and physical tasks in the same session, Christopher Ring, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the School of Sport, Exercise & Rehabilitation Sciences at the University of Birmingham in England tells Bicycling. Typically, study participants solve analog and digital puzzles or do memory recall exercises.

BET has been studied extensively and in those studies, participants completed the cognitive tasks as they rode, as well as pre- or postride. During a ride, subjects did pattern-recognition or short puzzles during slow intervals. They completed pre- and postride puzzles right before or right after a ride (not within a few hours or the next day). Also, many of the studies were done in isolation (no help from a friend!).

While they were all technically puzzles, across the studies the tasks were also designed to improve executive function skills, which are the mental processes that support your ability to plan, focus, remember, and multitask, according to Harvard University.

During these BET sessions, athletes work on building specific intellectual skills, including inhibition, updating, and switching. Samantha Soria, Psy.D., a Florida therapist, explains:

• Inhibition: The ability to notice a thought, action, or response and then resist engaging in it. For example, during a ride, you may remember a work task that you should have completed. Instead of turning back for home, you quickly consider your schedule and slot in a time to take care of it after your ride. You inhibit your impulse to stop cycling.
• Updating: The skill to continuously monitor and attend to new stimuli, integrate the new information, and replace the old information. For example, you may have had a goal to ride mid-pack with a group, but another cyclist is gabbing more than you’d like, so you drop back a bit, and find a new position to continue your ride in peace, thus updating your goal.
• Switching: Smoothly transitioning between different tasks or mental stimuli to train your brain to handle more stress and not become more fatigued. Cyclists might practice switching by solving a puzzle between intervals. For example, on your trainer, you could do a 10-minute warmup, then do eight reps of two-minute intense intervals. Follow each of those intervals by two minutes of rest during which you do a puzzle app or a pen and paper crossword or Sudoku. You’re switching back and forth between tasks.

How Brain Endurance Training Works

The rationale behind BET is that the addition of cognitive tasks to standard physical tasks during training creates a larger cognitive load—making training feel harder—which leads to adaptations in the brain, Ring explains.

It’s important that the cognitive tasks are challenging, Ring says, or sufficient adaptation won’t occur (just like if you never train hard on the bike, you won’t see improvements in VO2 max, lactate threshold, or other fitness markers). When the additional mental load is removed at the end of the training program, exercise feels easier and athletes perform better.

It’s important to note that BET does not drive physiological increases in fitness, explains Tomás García Calvo, Ph.D., professor of sports sciences at the University of Extremadura in Cáceres, Spain. “BET doesn’t directly improve VO2 max or muscle strength, but it enhances the ability to utilize physical training effectively, especially under fatigue,” he explains.

“We have conducted over a dozen training studies to date and find that BET reliably improves exercise performance most of the time for most tasks,” says Ring. Indeed, research has revealed brain endurance training to be a useful tool for athletes looking to improve their performance.

Improved Performance

In a study published in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport in 2023, 50 participants who engaged in postexercise BET could ride for longer before becoming fatigued and also reported lower ratings of perceived exertion (i.e., how hard the training session felt).

Marcona’s work also found that trial performance significantly improved for the BET group compared to the control group, but there were no differences between groups regarding VO2 max, heart rate, and lactate accumulation—supporting the inkling that athletic performance is also mental.

Some of the most recent research in this area has found BET to positively affect older adults and sedentary adults. In a Psychology of Sport and Exercise study published online in 2024, 24 healthy, but sedentary, women ages 65 to 78 performed BET and physical exercise training, exercise training alone, or no training at all. They completed three 45-minute training sessions (20 minutes of resistance training and 25 minutes of endurance training) each week for eight weeks. At the end of the study, the BET group showed improved performance during squats, arm curls, and walking, even when fatigued, and showed improvements in cognition.

Increased Resistance Training Capability

It’s not just cardio exercise that BET benefits. Engaging in cognitive tasks before and after resistance training could help you eke out more reps, according to a study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research in 2024. Participants who engaged in BET increased their maximum rep count of press-ups, burpees, jump squats, and leg raises to a greater degree than the non-BET group. This didn’t apply to static exercises like planks and wall-sits, though.

Another Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research study from 2024 saw similar results: Participants who performed cognitive tasks in conjunction with physical training experienced greater increases in their max rep count for chest presses and squat jumps, compared to those who didn’t do both types of training.

Improves Muscular Endurance

In a study published in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport in 2021, 36 participants were split into two groups: One performed hand-grip exercises only, while the other performed hand-grip and BET exercises. After six weeks of training, the BET group exhibited a 20 percent greater improvement in hand-grip endurance than the control group.

Researchers found similar results in a small study published in the European Journal of Sports Science in 2023. Participants had 12 percent greater improvement in maximal hand grip endurance performance, compared to those who only did physical training.

Though brain endurance training comes with an evident stack of benefits, “it’s not for every athlete,” says Ring. BET is hard, and “it makes training even harder,” he says. “It is only for athletes who are really motivated to improve their performance.”

In other words, cyclists should think of BET as the icing on the cake. Before incorporating it, athletes should master the foundations of training for their sport, Ring says. This includes their standard training, strength and conditioning, nutrition, and sleep.

Assuming you’ve got all your training bases covered, here are some tips from Ring on how to best incorporate it into your routine.

Keep It to Indoor Workouts

Practicing BET is best for indoor cycling workouts and then you can take the results outdoors. This is for safety reasons, Ring says—it’s dangerous to focus on anything other than the road when riding outside

Additionally, consistently performing BET with indoor workouts provides you with a better opportunity for assessing the difficulty of both the cognitive training and exercise training. With so many variables outdoors—traffic, weather, terrain changes, pedestrians—it may be impossible to assess whether it’s actually working.

Do It During the Off- and Preseasons

Because adding cognitive tasks to physical training makes the physical training harder, it would be wise to limit it during your racing season.

Think of it like strength training: You build a base in your off-season, using that time to push the weights and build muscle, strength, and power when you’re spending less time on the bike and have more time to recover from and adapt to those workouts.

You can maintain your new brain fitness during the racing season by implementing fewer, easier BET sessions around your easy rides.

Avoid Concurrent BET

Ring encourages athletes to do BET before or after zone 2 endurance rides for the best results. Use computer-based cognitive tasks such as those on SOMA-NPT, an app created in collaboration with scientists who study BET. Or, try the Stroop Test, in which you read color names out loud when they are shown in an incongruent color. For example, the word “red” is written in green and you have to say “red.” This test measures how well a person can inhibit their automatic response to name of the color of the ink instead of the word they see.

Of course, you can always just do some of your favorite online puzzles before or after your rides, rather than at a different time of day, according to Ring.

Assess and Adjust

As with any training protocol, assessment over time is key. Ring encourages athletes to check that the training feels harder than a physical-only session by assessing mental fatigue and perceived exertion at the end of each session.

Progressive overload is as important with BET as it is with physical training, Ring says. Make the tasks harder every week and choosing from a variety of tasks to keep things fresh.

At the start of your BET training, take note of how you feel after a 60-minute, zone-2 training ride. Then, after a month, see if you heart rate metrics have improved (the same ride should feel easier and your heart rate should be slightly lower).

Finally, be sure to taper or eliminate BET leading up to an important event, so your brain is fresh and the benefits of that cognitive training become noticeable during your race or extra long ride, say the experts.

Amanda Capritto

Contributing Writer

Amanda is a content writer and journalist with extensive experience in the health, fitness, lifestyle, and nutrition niches. She is a certified personal trainer and sports nutrition coach, as well as a triathlete and lover of strength training. Amanda's work has appeared in several notable publications, including Health Magazine, Shape Magazine, Lonely Planet, Personal Trainer Pioneer, Garage Gym Reviews, Reader’s Digest, CNET, LIVESTRONG, Health Journal, CleanPlates, Verywell Fit, Verywell Mind, and more.