Foldable Bikes Party: How losing concentration affects your cycling performance

Thursday, 27 October 2016

How losing concentration affects your cycling performance

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While much of the work of a sports psychologist is focused on helping an athlete perform to their optimum in competition, a key area of work for some is understanding how the brain processes information.

When dealing with cycling, it’s important to realise that information is flooding into the brain from all five senses as we ride our bikes. The study of how we cope with this plethora of information and what we do with it is central to our understanding of how we learn and perform a sports skill.

While many believe that the selection process is completely automatic, there’s evidence that you can improve your ability to attend to relevant cues

How much do we take in?

We receive a huge amount of information from our visual, auditory, kinaesthetic (the feeling of our body’s position in space), olfactory (smell) and gustatory (taste) senses.

How we deal with all this has led to considerable debate, but due to the difficulty of really understanding the workings of the brain there is no clear consensus. However, one theory is that the brain can only process a limited amount of information it receives at any one time.

Therefore, when on a bike, we will often be attending to visual information at the expense of the smell or taste information, due to lack of processing capacity.

You can read more at BikeRadar.com