Has 2012 Tour de France winner Bradley Wiggins reached his full potential?
Have you? Do you know anyone who has? Perhaps the problem lies with the whole notion of "reaching potential"?
One of the minor irritations of the Murdoch press is the paywall. Behind it are two of the most interesting journalists writing occasional articles about human performance: sports writer Matthew Syed and Chief Sports Correspondent Matt Dickinson. Just such an article recently was that by Matt Dickinson "Cyclists can be minded to overcome fatigue".
For advocates of conductive education, what he writes might sound rather familiar; familiar enough at least to remind us to look outside the field when it comes to addressing the question "How do you know conductive education works?"
Dickinson begins:
Given his association with marginal gains, eking out every minuscule advantage, Sir Dave Brailsford gave a startling response when I asked him recently what more there was left to squeeze from athletic performance. “We are nowhere near — nowhere near — the limits,” he said, emphatically.
Which answer led Dickinson to reflect:
"What is the limiter on peak performance? What stops a human running a sub-two hour marathon?
And adds this observation of the mainstream of sports research:
"Traditionally, sports scientists have focused on causes of muscular fatigue and measures of aerobic efficiency, VO2 Max and lactic threshold. Physiologists have found new ways to size up each human engine, modelling an individual's capacity over set distances to umpteen decimal places.
In other words, what we might recognise as a focus on the purely physical.
"But what if," queries Dickinson, "those sums are based on a fundamentally misplaced assumption: namely a failure to recognise that the body could be pushed much further if only the brain would let it?
This, says Dickinson, "is the new frontier which so excites men like Brailsford." The limits of what can be achieved are not physiological.
He acknowledges that "the significance of motivation, short-term goals and mental strength is as old as the hills." Even Roger Bannister new that the "greatest barrier is the mental hurdle" in running a four-minute mile. But in pushing beyond this adage, Dickinson quotes Professor Samuele Marcora from the University of Kent:
"There's more to come ... but to access it we need a different approach" .... "people always underestimate the mental challenge in endurance sport. They think it's primarily physical. ... We need something new to improve performance. A better understanding of neurobiology is where we'll push the records further."
I am not convinced of all that I read in Dickinson's article: "tests by Brazilian scientists using a week electric current" applied to the brain, for instance; or American scientists working with Red Bull applying "cranial magnetic stimulation"; and Dickinson's apparent confidence that the correct response to "only recently have we begun to understand properly how the brain works" is to ask "How can we intervene and manipulate it?" (my italics) or to show "how the brain can be tricked and trained" to significantly improve performance. This last all sounds too much like "brain training" to my mind.
Professor Marcora's interest, Dickinson explains, is in fatigue "what is it? what sets its limits?"; an interest that began in hospitals: "why, he wondered, do chemotherapy patients feel exhausted after treatment when, physiologically, little has changed." From patients he moved to sportspeople.
And so to Sir Bradley Wiggins OBE who this summer will make an attempt on the world hour record which Dickinson says he is expected to do and Professor Marcora believes he can further improve mentally.
Those who keep asking us how we know conductive education works or how we can prove it does, may, in looking solely to medical research, so much of it overwhelmingly physical (check out cerebral palsy on the internet and see what you find), may be looking in the wrong place for the answer. It may lie elsewhere. The improvements may come, the evidence we need, may come from work on "mental" training. If so, it may be worth those of us in conductive education looking more widely afield in making the case for CE, following developments in sports coaching and research, for instance.
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Footnote: As I suspect Matt Dickinson is, I too am intrigued by the questions and insights that the work of people like Professor Marcora reveals but I am not sure that I - and perhaps he - entirely grasps it. But what is clear to me is that in an increasing number of ways, people outside conductive education are pushing at and beyond the simplistic largely physiological explanations and practices that up to about ten years ago dominated mainstream thinking, just as conductive education has done in challenging the mainstream on the education and upbringing of those with motor disorders. And that, it seems to me, can only be a good thing - provided we avoid "brain training"!