Neural Deficits and Practice/Training

[iacas]

I’ll try to make a long story short.

Kevin Kirk talked about the idea of a “neural deficit” at the PGA Magazine Teacher of the Year conference.

He was working with his Tour guys and would find that they’d hit a wall after a few weeks on Tour and just have a hard time performing even slightly below average.

For example, let’s suppose your “capacity” to perform goes to 100. You get to a course on Monday, play a practice round, practice a bit after, etc. Plus travel, etc. It wears on you, and you deplete your capacity to 20. You sleep, and the next day, it’s 95. But you put in a full day, and deplete it down to 10. You recover to 85, and play the pro-am Wednesday, which involves being social and playing 18 holes, plus you practice a bit again. You’re down to 0, but recover to 75 or 80 to play the Thursday round.

This goes on for a few weeks, and eventually you’re starting the day at 25 or something, depleting yourself down to -40 or something during the day, and having a harder and harder time recovering.

In talking with some people about this, he learned that some scientists were conducting studies on people with heart rate monitors, except they weren’t measuring heart rates, but HRV. Heart Rate Variability.

The scientists found a few things (I’m being very general here):

• Going past five hours with anything approaching intense focus can pretty quickly put you at a neural deficit.
• Rest is restorative, but if you run up too much of a neural deficit, it takes several days of rest to really recover.
• Many of us will work 7-10 hours per day, then deal with the stresses of life, family, bills, workouts, etc. This can tax you.
• Stresses, both physical and mental/emotional, add strain to your system.

Patrick Reed, for example, will take this pretty seriously. He’ll cap his work day at five hours or so. Often, Thu-Sun, that’s warmup, a round, and then little else. He tries to relax the rest of the time.

On days when he’s home, he’ll schedule his five hours out to the minute, almost never exceeding five hours.

If you’re searching “neural deficit” you’ll find more severe symptoms, but this is what you might call “functional neural deficits” because you’re not literally having severe nervous system malfunctions. You just… can’t think quite as clearly, make the best golf swings, etc.

Whoop measures and tracks your strain, recovery, and sleep, and uses HRV as a cornerstone of this. I recommend checking it out (https://join.whoop.com/iacas for a deal). And join us in this topic, then.

This topic isn’t about the Whoop, though, but more the general talk of neural deficits, strain, recovery, etc.

Takeaway: consider your neural load on any given day. You can push yourself a little hard for a day or two or three in a row, but rest and recovery is important after that.

[saevel25]

All of that makes sense and fits in with what I think most people feel during the week. Let's say they get a pretty relaxing weekend. They work 5 full days of work and don't get much downtime. On Friday, they are struggling to do any optimal work at all. I feel like this is a common narrative for most people. 

I always found that if I could get 6 hours of high productive work done in a day, then I did good. Some days I can do more, and others I do less. Then there is time when I am doing very low focus work, like answering emails and doing other tasks that I can kinda just breeze through. I try to prioritize my work with how I feel. If I feel good, I will take on stuff that needs more of focus. If I am dragging, then I will find some easier stuff to work on. 

[JuanTheGolfer]

Here is a real life example, from the end of my first year in graduate school.  There was a two day exam which you had to pass to continue on in the program.  You fail, and no matter what your grades were the first year, you were out... in my Masters degree or anything to put on your resume.

So a friend and I went into study mode for two and one half weeks before the exam.  We would study those two weeks and then rest up for the exam.  We began at about 7 a.m. and ended each day about 8 p.m.  We lived on coffee and his wife's great cooking... we focused and focused and focused.

To break up the day when walked about a block away to a church parking lot which had a basketball hoop.  He and I were pretty decent ballers, and on the first day we shot 3s, and 2s and did some layups.  Played HORSE.  We did this every day.  By the end of the second week, we could barely make a lay-up.

So I can understand how these guys get beat up...

We were mentally and neurologically at a deficit.    We rested up for three days, and both passed the exam with ease, one of us got the highest score of the 32 who took it, the other finished 3rd.  Yes I will brag I got the highest score that had been recorded in the history of that exam.