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Neuro Athletes, 

Happy Wednesday. I know you are having a busy day so I appreciate you opening this email. It’s a fun one and I’m sure you will get plenty out of it.

Yesterday, I posted a thread on Twitter showcasing an athlete I am working with that I began to advise in 2018 and he blew up. So today’s email is going to be dedicated to breaking down the steps that I took with this athlete that gained him recognition in the European League.

Btw...if you were forwarded this newsletter, or you’re not a current subscriber, please take 3.2 seconds to click here and subscribe. Every week, I go deep into something that you can use and implement into your routine.

In 2018, I was approached by a father who found me on LinkedIn after I had posted about a soccer player I was working with in Australia. At first, I thought he was seeking my help but it turns out he was enquiring about his 16 year old son. After speaking with him for 45 minutes, I had a pretty good indication that his son was going to be something special. It wasn’t about the fact that he was good at his game or that he was skilful and knew what he wanted, it was more about the drive of the athlete and the willingness of his parents to do whatever it takes to see his son succeed. That’s what made me so excited and I wanted to learn more about them.

His son, let’s call him Ben, was 16 years old, made it to the top of the Australian soccer scene and had a dream of succeeding in Europe with the hopes of playing in the English Premier League one day. Before there were products and tools to help build a players performance on the mental side of things, Ben had been make shifting his own tools to help him with his vision, reaction time and accuracy.

As soon as he was offered a position in a European Academy in Spain, we started working together. We built out a his baseline measurements which included a full visual acuity test, focus tests and soccer accuracy tests. We looked at his sleep fitness core and also his timeline for goals.

Every single second was accounted for. I had a bi-weekly call with him on Thursdays where we went through his program. The program was updated every 14 days with minor adjustments to progression.

Here’s the breakdown of how we started with the Neuro Athletics program and why:

Baseline Metrics

In the Twitter thread, I addressed a few things we constantly optimised:

1. Vision Testing

2. Focus Testing

3. Reaction Time

4. Sleep Optimisation

5. Aggressive goal setting

I'll dive into them and if you have any questions please feel free to hit me with a reply.

Full Vision Test 

The building blocks of effective sports vision are visual acuity and contrast sensitivity. We cover the following visual tests:

• Visual Acuity

• Visual Processing Speed and Hand-Eye Coordination

• Contrast Sensitivity

• Eye Tracking

• Ocular Alignment

• Eye Dominance

• Depth Perception

What problem does vision solve in soccer?

Proper eyesight is absolutely critical for players in any sport and soccer is no exception. In soccer, vision contributes to the ability to make fast decisions, being aware of the surroundings, including opponents and players. I use Messi a lot in this email because I study him avidly.

Messi’s eyes are not normal. Pep Guardiola said Messi was always scanning the field for players who were open. Messi is always looking for the player who’s making the most decisive run that will lead to a goal for Barcelona and if the ball is on his left foot, which it usually is, he’ll pick out that player making the run with a killer pass.

Vision is by far one component of sport that is underrated and overlooked.

Reaction time

Reaction time is the interval between the onset of a signal (stimulus) and the initiation of a movement response. The reaction time for an auditory stimulus is about 170 ms, and for a visual stimulus is about 250 ms. When I study players like Lionel Messi (I wrote about him here), I see the impeccable ability to react with precision and speed. So I want to emulate this with my athletes and the only way to work on this is optimising the visual system by first gaining the measurements and improving them each week.

Reaction time can be broken down into three parts. The first is perception time, the time for the application and perception of the stimulus and giving the necessary reaction to it. In other words, perception time is how fast you recognize and process a stimulus, which ultimately can impact your success in sport (how fast your eyes perceive the stimulus).

The second is decision time, which signifies the time for giving an appropriate response to the stimulus (how fast your brain processes the stimulus and decides on an appropriate response).

The third is motor time, which is the time for compliance to the order received. Basically, this is the time it takes for your body to carry out the action (how fast your brain relays these messages to the body to produce an action).

At Neuro Athletics, we measure all three.

Sleep Optimisation 

If you are a regular Neuro Athletics reader you will know that sleep is the golden nugget. There is increasing recognition that sleep plays a significant role in aiding the recovery process in highly-trained athletes.

But how do we optimise if we don’t measure?

I had Ben fill out an athlete sleep questionnaire and from there, we started to track his sleep. We started off by introducing a sleep routine that consisted of getting him to bed at the same time each night and waking up at the same time each morning.

I will soon be getting him to sleep on an Eight Sleep mattress as the most fundamental tool to upgrade his sleep fitness (if you want to purchase one of these pods you can get $150 here using code NEURO).

This part of the process is always so fascinating to me as it brings out the best and worst in players. With the use of an Oura ring, I am able to track and measure Ben’s sleep metrics without him having to share anything with me.

I play close attention to his REM sleep and his SWS (deep sleep) score and figure out what doesn’t work well and what does. As a side note, I am always able to predict player outcomes leading up to a game when I see their sleep metrics ;-)

What problem does sleep optimisation solve?

Within the first month, we needed to address the importance of sleep on athletic performance. Understanding how to optimise sleep and sleep hygiene allows an athlete to overcome emotional barriers to performance and the ‘foggy brain’ phenomenon seen in individuals who lack sleep efficiency.

That's all for this week!

Hopefully, you had an awesome Cyber Monday and great start to the week. Get those 9 hours of sleep tonight and have an amazing upcoming week!

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