How our bodies relate to the world depends on how they respond to certain stimuli. For example, if I touch your arm, whether or not you flinch depends on a multitude of factors - the pressure I use, the speed I increase that pressure, the amount of skin covered in the touch, whether or not you were expecting the touch, etc.
Neural response encoding is typically used to train athletes to reduce their response times during performance, like throwing or catching faster, reacting quicker, etc., but it is also used to retrain certain aspects of your nervous system communications after an injury or traumatic event. You can check out these articles here and here to read up on how to use it for the application of rehabilitation. This post will focus on its use in athletic conditioning- how to train your reflexes so you can respond faster.
So, first, you might want to read up on muscle fibre types here and here. Enhancing your reflexes has to do with training not only your nervous system to respond faster to certain stimuli but also whether or not you have enough well developed fast twitch muscle fibres to respond quickly to the stimuli. Balance and proprioception training also seem to improve athletic performance and help to decrease your risk of injury.
So, with all of the formalities out of the way, let's get down to business.
I’ve been trying to think of a way to boil all of the research in this area down to a good introductory post here, and I think the best way is to introduce you to the idea of neural efficiency. Neural efficiency is the effect of a decrease in cortical activity as performance increases. This means that someone who is an expert in something uses less brain activity during a task than someone who is a novice. Their neural response to complete the task is more efficient than someone who isn’t an expert. This is true for motor responses as well as cognitive responses.
A perfect example of this is a shortstop who dives for a hard grounder, then flips to second from his knees to start a double play. The movements are so well ingrained that it looks like motion without volition. Quick reaction time is not just the result of God-given talent; it can be improved upon through targeted workouts. That shortstop makes it look easy because he's done it hundreds of times. Practice, practice, practice and you, too, will be complimented for being 'gifted' with quick reflexes.
Reflexes are involuntary. A reaction, however, demands thought, then movement. The more you practice this ‘thought, then movement’ pattern, the less time you need for the ‘thought’ part. The response to that particular stimuli has occurred so many times your body knows how to respond. It no longer needs to think about it. It has become an involuntary reflex.
That’s the basic idea behind neural response encoding. You do something over and over and over until it just becomes reflex. And then you can do additional things to make that reflex occur even quicker and with more power. The success of this training often has more to do with matching the training to the response, but to also recognize that you need to balance that training with the proper supplementary exercises to best support the activities. Think of it like training the stabilizer muscles of the knee while also training the quadriceps. If you focus all of your training solely on developing strong quadriceps, you can actually set yourself up for an injury because your knee stabilizers are too weak to support the explosive, powerful movement of the one overdeveloped muscle group.
When it comes to enhancing your in-game reflexes, you need to train not only that movement but also your ability to handle stress, game pressure, and your emotional responses to it. Think about it, if you can perform a certain movement over and over in a non-stressful environment, it increases your ability to perform it under game-time pressure, but at the same time, if you’re the kind of person who crumbles under pressure, it might not help you much at all. In that case, training your system to handle the stress of performing under high-pressure situations will further enhance your performance.
So how can you do this? The nice part is, most of the time you can start to train yourself at home using very little equipment - a coin, foam balls, some elastic bands, etc. You can get some friends to help you out by throwing things at you - preferably soft things. You can get more and more elaborate - obstacle courses, paintball games, etc. Incorporating some of these exercises individually but also including them in team practices, depending on your sport, is important. That way you’re also enhancing your ability to respond to actual game-like conditions. The more variety you add, the more you train your system to respond to any circumstance, whereas the more practice a specific drill the more you train yourself to respond as fast as possible to that specific scenario. The key in both instances is practice. No matter what approach you take, the more you do it, the better you’ll get at it.
The following are some practical ways you can improve your response and reaction times:
- Run nature trails - This is an easy way to improve your reflexes as it requires no special equipment and you can do it alone. Just remember to take a way to call someone and give them your location in case you injure yourself and are unable to get yourself back to civilization. The more uneven the ground, the more obstacles in your path and the faster you run all increase the difficulty of this exercise. Also, change up trails often as your brain will begin to remember the path so keep it guessing to keep seeing improvements.
- Reflex/reaction ball - A reflex ball is a special 6-knobbed ball that moves unpredictably, thereby forcing you to react to unpredictable direction changes to catch it.
- Improve your peripheral vision - Paying attention to what’s happening in your peripheral vision can greatly increase your ability to respond to what’s heading your way. An easy way to do this is to try watching tv, but keeping the tv at the limit of your peripheral vision and your eyes focused straight in front of you. Remember to do this for equal time on both sides.
- Other vision skills are also important - Including training for things like focus flexibility, dynamic visual acuity, depth perception, etc., can also help your performance. Seeing a sports vision specialist can be helpful to determine where you’re weak and what exercises would be best for you.
- Dodgeball/paintball/laser tag - Get your friends together and play a game that requires you to keep track of where others are, what they’re up to and how to respond to their presence and actions.