March 26, 2018 – Athletic Performance and the Brain

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Anchor lead: Can you utilize techniques used by athletes to improve your own physical and mental performance? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Integrating brain and body using training is key to superior athletic performance, research by Christopher Fetsch, a researcher in the Mind/Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins shows.

Fetsch: in addition to training their muscles and their agility and their strength, they are also training these mechanisms in the brain that combine information and very efficiently translate that into a plan to adjust body posture or more the muscles.  :15

Fetsch says such training has lessons for us all.

Fetsch: It is definitely true that there’s a great deal of plasticity in the central nervous system, which allows us to learn new skills and also stave off the effects of aging on cognitive performance, and so the more we learn about the mechanisms of decisions in the brain the potential is there to help people in their daily lives and as they grow older, to use that plasticity to better their lives. :22

Fetsch notes that improvements using training are possible at all ages. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.