Design data-driven cognitive training

programs for your athletes with

Soma Technologies.

Design data-driven cognitive training programs for your athletes with Soma Technologies.

Step 1

Identify the cognitive demands
for your athlete's sport.

The first step to creating a cognitive program, is to identify your athlete's cognitive demands for their sport.

Read the cognitive demand definitions below and think about how they apply to your athletes when they are competing.

This will give you an idea of which demands may be important for their sport and position.

Once you have identified the most dominant demands of your athlete's sport, create a list of demands starting with most dominant to least dominant.

Most athletes will require all demands to some degree but not equally.

Soma NPT’s cognitive tasks are categorised
based on the dominant cognitive demand.

Memory

The ability to consciously hold and use information.

View Tasks

Attention

Involves focusing mental awareness on relevant environmental cues and maintaining that concentration.

View Tasks

Response Inhibition

Refers to the ability to suppress inappropriate, irrelevant, or suboptimal actions.

View Tasks

Decision Making

Is the cognitive process resulting in the selection of an option or a course of action among several possible alternative options.

View Tasks

Step 2

Create a baseline test.

Now that you have identified a dominance hierarchy of cognitive demands for your athlete's sport, it is time to build a baseline test.

Select 2 tasks from each of the categories from your athlete's dominant category list.

If your athlete only has one dominant category, they may have 4 tasks in their baseline.

If you have found your athlete's cognitive demands are spread fairly evenly, select 1-2 tasks from each list with a maximum of 6 tasks in their baseline.

Do not overthink this step.

The purpose is to collect data to estimate where your athlete’s current capabilities are.

Focus on the cognitive demand, and adapt the load of the task with modes as needed.

Modes

Remember you need plenty of data in order to make good decisions.

Baselines that are too short (with not enough tasks) will not allow you to pinpoint where your athlete is struggling because the tasks are not long enough to tax them sufficiently to tire them out.

Also, short baselines will not give you enough data in terms of the number of responses. (i.e., micro-decisions).

However, we should be mindful that baseline assessments are also training their brain and so we need to load them carefully according to the stage of their yearlong season.

Here we must strike a delicate balance of obtaining the data needed, without disrupting the athlete's training regime.

Baseline Duration Guidelines

Off Season

45 - 60 min

Pre Season

30 - 45 min

In Season

20 - 30 min

Step 3

Analyse the baseline data.

Once your athlete has completed their baseline test, analyse their data and identify their strongest and weakest cognitive tasks for that cognitive demand.

The tool for this is the Soma Analytics Profiling Tool which gives you percentile breakdowns for each cognitive task across all measures and cognitive performances are categorised into Elite, Average, and Poor.

Generally speaking, if your athlete falls in the elite range for all the cognitive tasks you have selected for their baseline test, you may have underloaded the baseline (i.e., made it too easy for them).

You will need to find harder or more intense tasks for that cognitive demand or apply a specialised training mode to increase the overall load on the athlete's brain.

Most athletes will struggle with at least two areas of cognitive training when they begin.

If your athlete is acing everything (i.e., universally performing at an elite level), go back and create a new and more difficult baseline for them before you move to the next step.

Step 4

Create the cognitive training program.

Based on the data from the baseline test you should now see your athlete's strengths and weaknesses. You may now begin selecting cognitive tasks from the cognitive demands you want to focus on during the current mesocycle.

Rather than trying to find the perfect cognitive task, focus on the cognitive demand, analyse the data and adapt the cognitive training program by manipulating the task’s intensity, duration, placement, and overall load with specialised training modes.

Remember that this is an interactive process and you may need to adapt the plan, sometimes more than once, to optimise it for your athlete.

When designing the cognitive training plan we suggest focusing on your athlete’s weakest cognitive demand and then building their cognitive training plan by adding elements of the stronger cognitive demands, with a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio of weak to strong demands.

For example, if your athlete performed "poor" in the tasks chosen from the attention demand in the baseline, and "average" in the tasks selected from the inhibition demand in the baseline, your training plan could contain 2 attention tasks for every 1 inhibition task.

This means the cognitive training program is not just focusing on their weaknesses or strengths but rather is a mix/blend of both.

Remember that you are only as good as your weakest link but you still need to maintain and update your strong cognitive skills.

When creating your athlete’s cognitive training program you will also need to take into consideration how you will integrate the cognitive training program.

Cognitive Integration can
happen in 4 ways

Pre Training Integration

Performing cognitive training
prior to physical training.

This fatigues the brain and increases the athlete's perception of effort.

The increased perception of effort over the athlete's physical training increases their tolerance to a higher perception of effort.

Concurrent Integration

Combining cognitive training
while engaging in
cardiovascular training.

This is an extremely engaging integration that pushes an athlete to make fast, accurate decisions while maintaining a certain physical workload.

Intermixed Integration

Performing cognitive tasks
during rest periods of
physical training sessions.

This seamless integration increases the overall training load and requires the athlete to switch between physical and cognitive training.

Post Training Integration

cognitive

soma Npt

training Solution

Performing cognitive training
directly after physical
training.

This integration is very effective at mentally stretching athletes when they are already fatigued and replicates the demands of intense competition when athletes need to push their physical and mental limits.

Creating a cognitive training program that is comprised of cognitive demands that need improvement, as well as cognitive demands that need maintenance, is the proven key to success.

Adapt the load to the
current season.

Adapt your athlete’s cognitive program to fit in with the phase of their season: sessions should be relatively long, medium, and short in the off-season, preseason, and in-season, respectively.