The Athletic Brain: How Neuroscience is Revolutionising Sport and Can Help You Perform Better by Katwala Amit

Author:Katwala, Amit [Katwala, Amit]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781471155925
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2016-08-11T04:00:00+00:00

Just Beet It

According to the label, Beet It organic beetroot juice has a natural, earthy taste. I think it tastes like soil. I’m sipping it, rather tentatively, because according to Kotler drinking beet juice is a potential shortcut to flow. This better be worth it.

This particular brand is cut with apple juice to, and I quote, ‘smooth out’ the earthy tones – but you can buy concentrated shots of the stuff in specialist sports shops to dilute with water, or, if you’re particularly sadistic, mix in with your porridge of a morning. Beetroot juice also turns your urine pink, as I was slightly alarmed to discover a few hours later.

Athletes drink it because it’s packed with nitrates, which are already well known to aid endurance by boosting blood flow to the muscles and making the conversion of food into energy in the cells more efficient. During London 2012 some teams struggled to find beet juice because so many athletes were buying it. It may also help to get you into flow by providing your body with the resources it needs for the release of nitric oxide, one of the neurochemical precursors to a flow state.

This surprisingly thick purple liquid is just one of the ways Kotler and others are trying to hack flow, although they’re yet to see ‘any results worth a damn’ from beetroot juice – something I contemplate as I admit defeat and tip the rest of the bottle down the sink.

Flow hacking, as Kotler calls it, involves practising with different flow triggers. Throughout his book, Kotler uses case studies of extreme sports athletes – skateboarder Danny Way, BASE jumper Dean Potter, kayakers and snowboarders. His rationale is that the progress extreme sports athletes have made over the last few decades is utterly remarkable, and it’s all down to flow; their sports are rare in that they have all the ingredients required. To help those of us less inclined to leap off cliffs take advantage, he’s designed what he calls a ‘flow dojo’ – a kind of adventure playground for adults.

Inside, there will be trapezes, human gyroscopes and all manner of contraptions designed to give your body the sensation of risk, but in a safe environment. When I speak to Kotler, the project is deciding between two competing sites – one in Utah and one in Colorado – for their ‘extreme playground equipment’.

It’s not just a playground, of course; there’s a bit of science going on as well. Participants are wired up to all manner of headsets to measure their heart rate, the g-forces they’re being exposed to and, of course, their brain activity (by means of the same Versus headset used for neurofeedback). By training people to take the adrenaline rush of movement and turn it into alpha waves in their brain, the flow dojo can help them open the door to a flow state and all the benefits that brings.

One of those benefits is a rapidly increased rate of learning. A 2011 study by DARPA, the US military’s advanced research division, found that snipers trained in flow were 2.

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