Strength and Speed Training for Your Brain

WHAT WOULD YOU do to get an edge—at work, in sports, in life? Would you spend X amount of dollars? Would you take X kind of supplements? Would you even subject your brain to emerging technologies that may or may not work? Professional athletes have been the early adopters in the brain-training space. NFL quarterbacks are entering flow states with help from Dune-like, Bene Gesserit–style instruction. NBA players fine-tune their hand-eye coordination with virtual reality concentration exercises. MLB batters boost their averages through disrupted-vision drills. The pro versions of these tools are pricey, but there’s good news for those not named Jalen, Steph, or Shohei: The tech is trickling down to us civilians.

“The democratization of the science is driving consumer interest,” says cognitive neuroscientist Greg Appelbaum, PhD, a psychiatry professor at the University of California, San Diego, who has studied this field for more than a decade. “There’s no doubt the technology has gotten cheaper. Now you can get many of these products for the price of one or two pairs of Nikes.”

Yes, some of this still-early-days tech has stronger marketing than it does peer-reviewed research. But many experts believe that the future for brain trainers is promising. One of the biggest and most encouraging categories: cognitive training tools that buff up visual processing skills. “The brain is like a muscle you can isolate,” says Murali Doraiswamy, MD, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine. “Many of the products that are like video games are backed by evidence-based science to improve your reaction time.”

Appelbaum, who recently published a systematic review of more than 100 studies on sports vision training, is also on the cautiously bullish side. “It’s clear that you can train certain visual skills and that this training can fix multiple bottlenecks,” he says. “There’s real evidence that these regimens work for specific applications.” Whether you want to wield more focused brain waves or enhance your vision, here’s a deeper look at three of the more exciting products in this new world.

Reflex and Coordination Training

THE PROMISE: Any athlete can use high-tech virtual reality drills to improve depth perception, tracking, reaction, and hand-eye coordination.

THE PRODUCT: Reflexion Go, $29/month (requires Meta Quest headset, sold separately), reflexion.co

BEFORE A NEW user starts playing training games on Go, the application’s virtual coach asks questions to determine preferences and baseline abilities and then builds out a regimen with daily and weekly goals. Right now, Reflexion has about 10 games on the platform to boost cognitive performance. One game, called Portals, challenges you to catch targets of different colors, each on various flight paths, to improve your mental flexibility. Other games challenge you to quickly stop a motor action you started, as you might when you realize an incoming pitch is a ball and not a strike. As users train with Go, the system adjusts the difficulty of the games. The data on effectiveness is still incoming, but in one small study, a cohort of NCAA Division I quarterbacks used a similar training protocol and decreased the time it took them to find a receiver by 9 percent.

Neurofeedback

THE PROMISE: Leveraging technology that measures brain activity, consumers gain feedback on how their mind operates and learn to access a flow state—in sports or daily life.

THE PRODUCT: Myndlift, from $150/month, plus Muse 2 headband ($199), myndlift.com

USING SOFTWARE THAT was first developed for clinical purposes, Myndlift collects specialized data from different parts of the brain. Users are always paired with a neuro coach through video or messaging, as if they were working with a clinic. “The goal is to help you reach a relaxed focus state—a specific brain state called SMR where you have high alertness,” says company founder and CEO Aziz Kaddan. After an initial brain health assessment through the app, you’ll talk to the neuro coach to discuss your results and goals. Your protocol may include playing games that hone your ability to focus and enter that SMR brain state. One game involves two racing aliens, with your alien picking up speed as your EEG data indicates you’ve reached a state of focus. (Fun, right?) “The promise of neurofeedback is that it can help people enter a flow state—this is the thing that differentiates truly great athletes from everyone else,” says Dr. Doraiswamy. And research suggests that anyone—from pros to regular joes—can train themselves to do so using EEG.

Stroboscopic Training

THE PROMISE: Strobing is based on the well-studied premise that intermittently disrupting vision can lead to improved sensory performance.

THE PRODUCT: Senaptec Strobe Pro, $399, senaptec.com

THIS SPORTY EYEWEAR initially developed at Nike has helped pro athletes level up their performance. The lenses can flicker on and off in eight different patterns (the longer the blackout period, the greater the challenge), and users can also choose to have the top or bottom half of each lens completely blacked out (even tougher).

Tiffany Frankovich, CEO of Senaptec, recommends that consumers new to the device train with the eyewear for 10 or 15 minutes three times a week. “You should start with simple tasks at first—maybe just walking on a treadmill, for instance,” she says. “And then slowly increase the difficulty—say, start doing lunges.”

The mechanism is interesting: Your eyes take in way more information than your brain can process. If you limit what your eyes see while you’re performing other tasks, you can help your brain process faster by relying on your other senses. One study analysis found that this processing exceeds 200 gigabytes of information per second—but research indicates that you can train your brain to work faster and smarter if you force it to process visual input more efficiently.

This story appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Men’s Health.

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