✍️ 🧠 Upside Guest Writer: Enhancing Cognitive Fitness in High Performance Environments, By Leonard Zaichkowsky

This week our guest writer is Dr Len Zaichkowsky, PhD. Len is a world-class expert in biofeedback, psychophysiology, and cognitive fitness, specializing in the application of neuroscience and psychology to elite sports performance. With decades of experience as a professor, researcher, and consultant, he has worked with top professional teams across the NHL (Penguins, Canucks), NBA (Warriors), European soccer (Real Madrid), NFL, and Olympic levels, the Spanish men national soccer team, integrating cognitive training and psychophysiological techniques to enhance focus, resilience, and decision-making under pressure. A pioneer in sport psychology and human performance, Dr. Zaichkowsky has authored influential books, including The Playmaker’s Advantage, and continues to shape the future of cognitive fitness in sports and beyond.

This week’s article is called “Enhancing Cognitive Fitness in High Performance Environments”. Read on.

By Dr Len Zaichkowsky, PhD

What it takes from a psychological perspective to consistently produce and sustain high performance under pressure is remarkably common across many occupations, including sport, emergency services, policing, medicine, performing arts, and the military. With increasing media coverage of the psychological aspects of performance in high performance environments, people who work in these occupations are now aware that they need to attend to the non-technical as well as the technical drivers of high performance. What it still lacking, however, is an understanding of what these non-technical components are, how to measure them, and how they can be deployed.

If we make a comparison with physical fitness, the knowledge gap becomes obvious. Athletes in every sport, including e-sports, understand the importance of being physically fit to compete at the highest levels and could, if asked, describe what makes up physical fitness. Their descriptions would include factors such as strength, power, agility, speed, flexibility, balance, and cardiovascular endurance. This knowledge base is possible because over the years, sports scientists, exercise physiologists, and strength and conditioning coaches have identified the components of physical fitness, learned how to measure them, and developed methods to train the critical components.

The identification and measurement steps formed a crucial pathway to the training techniques. Traditional high-performance preparation typically involves a great deal of training time devoted to technical skills and strategy development alongside elite physical preparation. Many hours are spent at the training facility, with much repetition and simulation under practice pressure to ensure that high-performance quality is maintained in the face of fatigue, internal and external pressures, and distractions. These skill training protocols have been informed by learning theory, the evolution of neuroscience, and the growing body of evidence in the literature on motor skill acquisition.

However, even cursory observation of highly trained individuals and teams in high-performance environments will highlight performance errors occurring under fatigue, pressure, and distraction conditions. The often-deployed coach/trainer response has been to return to the training environment and complete more and more repetitions and simulations in the hope that skilled execution will be more successful next time.

As noted above, what is often ignored or poorly understood in these traditional high-performance settings is the importance of training non-technical skills, specifically cognitive skills, in a similarly systematic and evidence-based way. The benefit of years of traditional training, practice, and competition experience can quickly evaporate if the individual is unable to maintain composure (self-regulation), focus concentration, control thoughts and self-talk, and make appropriate and effective decisions under pressure.

The concept of Cognitive Fitness (CF) has been developed as a new paradigm to help demystify the key psychological aspects of high-performance preparation and execution (Aidman, 2020). Like the components of physical fitness, all aspects of cognitive fitness can be improved with deliberate and structured practice using well-known and tested practices such as controlled breathing, imagery, and high-tech applications such as bio/neuro-feedback. The preliminary requirements are an understanding of the key components of cognitive fitness and an evidence-based framework upon which to develop relevant knowledge and training drills for high-performance individuals and teams.

Although related terms such as Mental Fitness and Mental Readiness have been written about in the literature over the past decades, none received the traction that the Aidman (2020) paper received. Much of Aidman’s initial work was supported by the Australian Department of Defense. Important follow-up work followed this publication, in particular the expert international multi-disciplinary Delphi panel (Albertella, 2023). International experts were recruited from four performance domains:

1. Defense

2. Competitive Sport

3. Civilian High Stakes

4. Performance Neuroscience

Experts rated constructs from the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework (Insel, et al., 2010) in order to arrive at a consensus on the critical cognitive factors related to performance. The resulting set of neuroscience-informed constructs, applicable within and across performance domains, can serve as an integrated framework for high-performance cognition in the broader field of human performance, and thus shared knowledge and expertise. This should ultimately lead to the development of sensitive measurement tools for more precise cognitive assessment, as well as better-targeted interventions.

While this important international academic work was being conducted, Zaichkowsky & Peterson (2018) published The Playmakers Advantage: How to Raise Your Mental Game to the Next Level, an examination of superior decision-making skills in high-performing athletes and cognition in general. The thrust of the book was to expose the dearth of our understanding of elite athlete thoughts and emotions.

The authors of this chapter wish to introduce the next generation of performance psychologists to Cognitive Fitness and the notion of the Cognitive Gym. Underpinning the Cognitive Gym are the three key pillars of an effective high-performance mindset:

• Self-regulation skills to cultivate composure and calmness

• Attention control knowledge and skills to stay focused on the right thing at the right time

• Mental agility to be flexible and able to adapt to dynamic and variable performance demands

These essential psychological skills are supported by cognitive capacities (cognitive primaries) such as self-awareness, memory updating, task switching, impulse control, and cognitive flexibility that can now be linked via peer-reviewed research to neuroscience-informed assessments and interventions.

Once the cognitive primaries are identified, developing cognitive fitness requires a long-term investment of time and deliberate practice, just like for physical fitness. Reliable, evidence-based measurement of cognitive fitness attributes is critical to optimizing this investment by tracking the progress of its outcomes and informing decisions about any required changes/adjustments to the training program.

The Cognitive Fitness Framework (CF2)

The CF2 model (see Figure 1 below) includes:

• Foundational training knowledge and drills – training cognitive attributes such as attention, executive control, and co-action trainable at the initial Cognitive Gym phase

• Advanced training drills – including stress and arousal regulation, adaptability, teamwork, situational awareness, and decision-making

• Performance/mission-ready training – mission-ready training such as tolerances (to sleep loss, monotony, pain, frustration, uncertainty, and resistance) and resistance (to distraction, deception, or manipulation)

• Performance/operational augmentation – developing support tools such as decision aids and fatigue countermeasures

• Cognitive recovery – employs reflexive (e.g., mindfulness) and restorative practices (e.g., proper nutrition and sleep hygiene)

Two other points need to be made at this time:

1. The periodization of cognitive training in the CF2 cycle is hypothesized to optimize both real-time cognitive performance and the resilience that enables life-long thriving.

2. CF2-based training and preparation include ‘gold standard’ protocols such as: isolate, overload, and recover.

_{Figure 1. The cognitive fitness cycle. Adapted with permission from Aidman (2020).}

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REFERENCES

Aidman, E. (2020). Cognitive fitness framework: towards assessing, training and augmenting individual-difference factors underpinning high-performance cognition. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 13, 466. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2019.00466.

Albertella, L., Yucel, M., Kirkham, R., Aidman, E., & Zaichkowsky, L., et al. (2023). Building a transdisciplinary expert consensus on the cognitive drivers of performance under pressure: An international multi-panel Delphi study. Frontiers in Psychology: Performance Science, 13.

Fogarty, G., Crampton, J., Bond, J., Zaichkowsky, L., Taylor, P., & Aidman, E. (2023). Neurobiological Foundations of Cognitive Fitness in High-Performance Applications. In B. Boyle, G. Northoff, A. Burbey, F. Fregni, M. Jahanshahi, A. Pascual-Leone, & B. Sahakian (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience: Cognitive Systems, Development and Applications (pp. 574-590). Delhi, Sage Publications.

Insel, T., Cuthbert, B., Garvey, M., Heinssen, R., Pine, D. S., Quinn, K., Sanislow, C., & Wang, P. (2010). Research domain criteria (RDoC): Toward a new classification framework for research on mental disorders. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 167(7), 748-751. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2010.09091379

Zaichkowsky, L., & Peterson, D. (2018). The Playmaker’s Advantage: How to Raise Your Mental Game to the Next Level. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.

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