The Brain, The Nervous System & Sports Performance

The Brain, The Nervous System & Sports Performance

If there's a silver lining to be found in anything, I'll find it. Having the extra bit of time during lockdown has been a god send for me (and you). Extra time to absolutely nerd out on reading research papers and brush up on some of the stuff that I haven't particularly looked at in quite a while. Recently I've been looking into isometric muscle contractions and their role in maintaining/developing strength and including them in a programme with plyometrics and speed work. No matter how far I go down the rabbit hole , it all ends up back in one place, The Brain & The Nervous System. In  reality, when we talk about sports performance from a physical and a technical/tactical perspective we can't get away from the fact that The Brain rules everything. This article should help shed some light on that!

A basic outline of the Central Nervous System & Peripheral Nervous System.

Hopefully by the time you get to the end of this you'll have a clearer idea of why training programmes for sports performance have such structure to them and why it's always important to STICK TO THE FUCKING PLAN.

The Nervous System itself is broken into two distinct sections. The Central Nervous System (CNS) and The Peripheral Nervous System (PNS). The CNS is everything contained within The Brain and The Spinal Cord. The PNS is everything outside of that towards the extremities. From The Brain, the cranial nerves extend out and spinal nerves branch out from The Spinal Cord. They start very thick and visible relatively speaking in the body but as they branch out repeatedly to every region of your body possible, they get smaller and smaller until they are invisible to the naked eye. This is part of what makes the nervous system so fascinating!

Sparing any unnecessary details in that section, the reason we need to know about these is because these nerves are what helps communicate between the different regions of the body. It links what you see to how you react. It links what someone does to and then how you feel in response to it. It's an intricate system that's crucial for health and daily life. The best part is, you can train it to be more efficient at doing it's job. The cells that make up the nervous system are called neurons (I'll get into that bit soon). Carrying messages in towards the nervous system are afferent neurons. Efferent neurons carry messages outwards towards their destination, whether that's a muscle fibre to contract or your adrenal glands to secrete adrenaline in response to fear. It all goes down in the Nervous System.

With any luck you've made it this far. Here, I'm going to explain a motor neuron. So, in the body you have (for arguments sake) millions of neurons. They are all interconnected with each other, kinda. They all interact with each other. The way they communicate with each other is through nerve impulses. Impluses are essentially electrical activity that travel around the body telling our body what to do and when to do it.  They all originate either from The Brain or The Spinal Cord and they conclude at some other point in the body. For us, we're naturally going to be talking about muscle fibres. Neurons which conclude at a muscle fibre are known as motor neurons. Below is an illustration of a singular NEURON and all it's parts.

Illustration of a single neuron.

The electrical signal is collected by the dendrite. If this signal is strong enough to promote a nerve impulse then this impulse is transported down along the length of the neuron's body, called the axon. If the signal isn't strong enough, then the impulse dies there. The myelin sheath is a protective covering of the axon which helps nerve impulse travel faster. This has major implications when it comes to skill development because as you train, or complete repetitions of a skill, your brain builds stronger connections or new neurons  to those regions and begins to myelinate these neurons to help impulses travel more efficiently. Thus, making the skill more efficient. But more on that some other time!

As the impulse reaches the end of the axon, it reaches the axon terminal. Depending on where this neuron is, it will either transfer this signal to a nearby neuron or if it is a motor neuron, its end target will be a muscle fibre (see image below). Once this nerve impulse reaches the muscle fibre at the neuromuscular junction, the message of whether to contract or relax will be realised.

Motor neuron and it's corresponding muscle fibre. Where the neuron meets the muscle fibre, this is known as the neuromuscular junction.

Give yourself a big bualadh bos (clap in Irish) if you've made it here. To tie all this in to what we're talking about - every muscle contraction starts with an impulse. A nerve impulse either directly from The Brain due to sensory inputs like sight and making decisions ahead of time, or they come from The Spinal Cord as a sort of reflex action during plyometric jump training (we'll be diving into this more soon).

The stronger the nerve impulse, the more efficient the resultant movement is going to be. The better the skill being performed, is performed, the more myelin that gets produced which in turn develops better neural pathways. This then has the potential to develop new, more complex neural pathways to help learn more complex skills.

The take home message is, it's all controlled by The Brain. And we must understand that before we can truly appreciate why plyometrics are beneficial for us or why isometrics can work in gaining strength and a whole bunch of other nerdy stuff that I'm into!

Thank you for checking me out! Thanks for giving up your time to read through my thought process and hopefully it opens your eyes a bit more to the small minute details that are thought about when designing a programme to improve sports performance. It's not all just sets and reps for the sake of it.

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Feel free to get in touch if you have any further questions on anything you've read so far.

If your main goal is to get quicker, more powerful and more explosive and you'd like help to achieve those goals then hit me up and let me take care of your training - clock's ticking!