Brain Training

Cognitive Conditioning: Players and coaches are coming to appreciate that cognitive conditioning is as important as physical conditioning. After all, it’s the brain that controls the movement of the body and the split-second decisions made on the field.

"What the mind perceives, the body achieves… eventually. The gap delay between perception and achievement is your reaction time. If your brain speed is slow, then you will be slow no matter how physically prepared you are."
— Dr. Peter Gorman
BFS Advisory board Member

Speed and Accuracy

Brain speed and accuracy play a central role in sports. When a player reacts to any action on the field, the player must go through several split-second steps engaging both the mind and the body. We break that response into five steps, we call “using your RADAR” — Recognize something happened, Attend to what happened, Decide what to do, Accept that decision with a message from the brain to the body, and React physically.

As one example, let’s look at hitting a baseball. It takes only about four-tenths of a second from the release of a pitch until it crosses the plate. This is a great example of why split-second improvements in brain speed matter.

Whether it’s throwing a block in football, a quick dart down the court in basketball, a slap shot in hockey, a lob in tennis, a pass in soccer, or hundreds of other moves in any sport, a split-second movement can change everything. Even when seemingly instinctual, those movements are decision-based.

Whether it’s throwing a block in football, a quick dart down the court in basketball, a slap shot in hockey, a lob in tennis, a pass in soccer, or hundreds of other moves in any sport, a split-second movement can change everything. Even when seemingly instinctual, those movements are decision-based.

True Agility

Efficient decision-based movement is “True Agility.” There’s a gap between when a player receives sensory information and acts on it. That reaction time has both a physical and a mental component. Most training focuses on improving physical movement and fails to train the cognitive component. We’ll rank players as “faster” and “better” if they can out-run others by just a couple of tenths of a second (200 milliseconds), but we do little to measure or improve brain speed by similar amounts. True Agility is about training an athlete to minimize the gap delay in reaction time.

Sign up for your free Daily Spark exercises or get your own customized brain workouts by subscribing to BrainHQ and SAVE as a BFS Affiliate!

BrainHQ Core Training for Sports

BrainHQ offers dozens of computerized exercises and regimens that target just about every major system of the brain.

Training for sports starts with five exercises that target the speed and accuracy of the visual processing system. This is core training. Dozens of other exercises target other cognitive skills that can contribute to peak performance on and off the field.

BrainHQ exercises quickly and continuously personalize to each user (using smart algorithms to adjust stimuli based upon all your prior performance data). The exercises get harder when you are having a good day, and ease-off when you are having a bad day, to keep pushing you through your current threshold to new levels of your “personal best.”

Cognitive Abilities

A wide range of cognitive abilities play a critical role across virtually all sports and positions, including: Performance at each such cognitive task can be changed, with the right kind of training. That training is BrainHQ

Performance at each such cognitive task can be changed, with the right kind of training. That training is BrainHQ!

Why BrainHQ

What makes BrainHQ unique is the science. BrainHQ is built on the foundation of the science of brain plasticity – the brain’s ability to change chemically, structurally, and functionally in response to sensory and other inputs.

BrainHQ was designed by the world’s leading experts in brain plasticity to make the brain perform better. Hundreds of university-based scientists joined together to design, test, refine, and validate the exercises and assessments in BrainHQ.

A recent independent expert review of brain training apps found most had no studies showing they worked, and that only BrainHQ had multiple high quality studies.

In fact, there are now more than 140 peer-reviewed science and medical journal articles about the wide range of benefits of BrainHQ exercises and assessments across varied populations. Those benefits include gains in standard measures of cognition (e.g., speed, attention, memory, decision-making) and generalization to real world activities (e.g., balance, gait, driving, everyday tasks).

*Average study results on standard measures, illustrated as applied to sports. Individual results will vary.

Continuous Measurement

To improve performance, start by measuring it. BrainHQ takes a baseline on each exercise the first time you use it, and continuously (and voluminously) records your performance and progress over time.

Fits Your Life BrainHQ is built to fit into your life. An average exercise block can be done whenever you have a couple minutes. While recommended usage is 20-30 minutes a day at least 3 days a week, many studies show significant gains in just 10 hours of training. Sleep helps consolidate gains, so what is hard today may seem easier tomorrow. BrainHQ lives in the cloud, so you can train from most devices (smartphones, tablets, computers).

Researchers Find BrainHQ Has the Most, and the Best, Science

Scientists affiliated with five research institutes in Australia recently conducted the first systematic review of the studies supporting various commercial brain-training products. They found most brain apps had no studies to support them, and only BrainHQ had multiple high-quality studies. The reviewers noted that BrainHQ had multiple studies that “fulfilled the gold standard for clinical trials.” The review was published in Neuropsychological Review.

About BrainHQ 

BrainHQ is an online brain-training system built by Posit Science. It features 29 exercises that work out attention, memory, brain speed, intelligence, navigation, and people skills. More than 100 papers have been published in scientific journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association, on the BrainHQ exercises and assessments.

The Cognitive Benefits are Proven

More than 100 published scientific papers show the benefits of BrainHQ exercises and assessments. Most of these were independently conducted by scientists at respected universities, such as the University of Southern California, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins.

Why This Matters

BrainHQ has 29 online exercises that work out attention, brain speed, memory, people skills, navigation, and intelligence.

If you want, you can have BrainHQ tell you exactly which exercises to do, and in which order: the personalized trainer feature, designed by scientists, continually measures your performance and serves up the exercises that will benefit you the most. Or if you prefer, you can design your own program, choosing exercises and workouts that meet your goals and standards.

Published Research on BrainHQ and Brain Processing Speed

Perhaps the most important goal of BrainHQ training is to speed up your brain’s processing. That is because quick, accurate processing of information that comes in through hearing, reading and vision affects “higher” cognitive functions – such as memory and problem-solving. When the brain cannot keep up with the speed at which information is coming in, it makes only partial representations of that information. This has short-term and long-term effects. In the short term, for example, it might lead you to mishear a play call or classroom instructions. In the long term, for example, it may affect memory and decision-making, since your brain only has a fuzzy recording to rely on. 
Many BrainHQ exercises are designed to gradually speed up visual and auditory processing. Some 20 papers have shown improvements in speed of processing.
The IMPACT Study (led by researchers at the Mayo Clinic and the University of Southern California) showed that using six BrainHQ exercises for 40 hours led to an average increase in auditory processing speed of 135%.
*The ACTIVE Study, one of the largest and most prestigious studies on cognitive training in adults ever conducted, saw a doubling, on average, in visual processing speed after just 10 hours of training with an exercise in BrainHQ, now called Double Decision. 
Two imaging studies led by scientists at Northwestern University showed that training with a set of BrainHQ’s auditory exercises could reverse negative trends in the brain: one recorded faster neural timing and precision and the other saw a better balance of speech representation in the brain. Both showed that these structural brain changes were accompanied by functional changes in how well the people could process sound and hear in noisy environments.
Dozens of other studies have shown that improvements in processing speed have benefits in real world activities, such as driving, balance, gait and everyday cognition.

Sign up for your free Daily Spark exercises or get your own customized brain workouts by subscribing to BrainHQ and SAVE as a BFS Affiliate!

5 Minute Exercises

It takes under five minutes to do each BrainHQ level, so you can use it in tiny bites or long blocks, depending on your class or team schedule. Use BrainHQ on almost any computer or mobile device. You can set up team training goals and have BrainHQ send you training reminders.

Like the BFS Total Program keeping records is the key

You train in one exercise for less than five minutes at a time. Then you train at that exercise again, either right away or at a later time - until you are at your best. Sometimes that takes a few tries, and sometimes it takes many.
The program provides feedback for each level, you can review your starting score, your improvement, your training effort, and much more.
Like BFS you are not competing against others. You are competing against yourself, working to perform better than you did when you started.