Highlight: Exploring Endurance Through Psycho-Biological Theories

In today's Lattice Podcast highlight, host and coach Josh Hadley sits down with coach Cameron Hartley to explore two interesting theories. The ‘Central Governor Theory’, which suggests that a system in our brain signals when it's time to stop exercising to prevent potential harm, and the ‘Psycho-Biological Theory’, which integrates psychological constructs into our understanding of endurance performance.

Highlights from this discussion include:

• Understanding exercise cessation: The role of the brain in regulating physical limits according to the Central Governor Theory.
• Integrating psychology in endurance: How the Psycho-Biological Theory emphasises the perception of effort and motivation.

This episode is just a highlight from a more in-depth conversation that covers additional insights on endurance performance and how these theories can be applied in training. For the full discussion, tune in to the complete episode available on all major podcast platforms.

The Lattice jingle is brought to you by Devin Dabney, music producer of the outdoor industry who also hosts the American Climbing Project.

Transcript

josh (00:00)
First explain to me what the central governor theory is and then explain to me what the psycho -biological theory is. So the central governor theory is a theory that was designed to explain why we reach exercise cessation. So the reason why we stop and it puts it down to a point or...

a system in our brain that says that's enough, it's time to stop training or stop performing because we're going to put the body into a potential damage or harm. Yeah. Okay. Right. So I think I've heard about this in the context predominantly in long endurance races, right? So like, yeah, ultra marathons and these things like that, because essentially there was like the main limiting factor is almost certainly for a lot of people, your head's holding you back. It's like a...

It's a race of grit and determination almost. And I think if you're listening to this and you wanna learn more about that, there's a really good book called Endure. I can't - that is an amazing book. I can't remember the author. Alex Hutchinson. Yes, okay, so if you want like a brief overview of year one BSc sports science, like physiology, it's a great book. I was actually introduced to it in year three. It was quite late into my physiology. Yeah, so I listened to it post -uni.

And when I was like, cool, I wish I'd read this book before uni because like, I feel like it would have given me such a good base of like going into that kind of area. The psychobiological model is included in that, in like the perception of effort section. But it's a fantastic book, especially the stuff I remember them talking about.

nutrition and how they were about the dehydration and that when you're running you can well they How did they word it? They? Got them to have like a pipe that went into their stomach and they put water in so that they were hydrated And then they also got them to sip water and the people that were sipping water Reported feeling quenched. Whereas the ones that were being ejected was

Yeah, sounds like a horrible state to take part in. We felt dehydrated. So there's loads of interesting stuff in there that you go, wow. So there's a psychological component. A psychological component. A behavioral experience, I guess, which is contributing to your feelings of being fat. And this is, I guess, going to carry over into fatigue as well, right? So let's jump into the biologic, psychobiological. Yeah, so I'll probably briefly touch on why I read up on the psychobiological.

model. So my part from being a lattice coach, I'm doing a PhD on the side and as part of my PhD, I use this model called the Psycho -Biological Model of Endurance Performance to understand how mental fatigue impacts our sport performance. So that's how I started getting into the Psycho -Biological Model looking at how our mental fatigue impacts us and the...

The interesting things about the psychological model is that it's the first concept that allowed for psychological constructs to be introduced into.

the model, so understanding it's an effort -based decision -making model built on other theories from psychology. So it allows for that integration of psychology into physiology. So rather than going, we've spotted something interesting here, let's do loads of research and come up with our new concept. You can actually go, well, what has psychology done and how can we apply psychology to this situation? So there's a communication between disciplines.

Okay, so why is this so important to, I guess, A, our performance and B, how can it be important for our training? So I'll give a brief overview of the psychobiological model. It's made up of five different constructs. There's two main constructs and then there's three that work alongside it to regulate performance. The main two are perception of effort and potential motivation. So perception of efforts are like our rating of perceived exertion.

you'll be familiar with the Borg scale and, so, yeah, I see your face go there. I'm familiar with the Borg scale, but for someone that has not followed that, or maybe, you will have heard of RPE, I guess. Yes, RPE. Most people have heard of RPE, but if not, briefly describe what this is. So it's a scale that rates how hard your effort is in performance. It's also, it can be labeled as the perception of exertion.

won't get into the differentiation between effort and exertion because it's just getting into the finicky of words, but even that's quite interesting in itself. So you've got perception of effort, so how much or how hard something is, how much energy you're putting into a task. So on a one, that's like I'm doing, I'm resting and I'm on a 10, that would be absolute maximum effort. I could not try any harder. Yes, that's correct. Yeah. And let's just say you sometimes will see this rate from a six to a...

is that right? Yeah. So that one's interesting. So a bit of a brief history on Gunnar Borg. So Gunnar Borg was a physiologist in the 1960s who developed the Borg scale and he observed in his athletes that they were...

Yes, so they rate that at 12, yeah. And the Borg RPE scale, based on that observation, with 60 being what you would typically see as the resting heart rate for a healthy 20 -year -old, which was the sample for the study, and then 200 being the theoretical maximum because of maximum heart rate calculations. So that's where the 6 to 20 scale originated from. Right, okay, yeah. And now if you're a rock climber and you're doing a board session,

This is why we use like a one to 10. Cause it's not, there's no reason now to pull across a scale, which was related to heart rate during steady state exercise. Now we're talking about just rating like a, the effort in a session or even a route climb for example, but also, recently I was saying, I spoke to Simon Fryer. We spoke about how you have the Metabay reflex. So your heart rate doesn't necessarily correspond to fatigue and climbing. So actually using heart rate for climbing is.

has its own issues. So the one to 10 is probably where we're going most of this. And usually our brain has a pretty good understanding of how much effort we're putting into something. So just leaning into it and trusting it rather than trying to overanalyze it can be quite useful sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I've, I've do wrote it. What was the next one after effort? So we've got potential motivation. So potential motivation is based on, Bream's motivational intensity theory. And the idea with this is that we put a ceiling on the mat.

amount of effort we're willing to invest in a task subconsciously. So you might, or you can do it consciously as well, but it can be subconscious. So you, let's say you're going into an endurance session, like an arching session or a very low intensity climbing session. You'll do that, that session until you reach your, your motivation, your, your ceiling, the point at which you decide this is enough for me. It's kind of how hard do you want it?

Yeah, how hard you want it. Is it worth investing this energy anymore into this task or should I invest it elsewhere? So that could be just sitting there and doing nothing. So recuperating that energy. Or there might be something more interesting, like going to try the new Boulder problem in the gym. So it's trying to manage your motivation and make sure you're investing the energy in the right areas to get the best performance for you. What you think's your best performance. Yeah, that's interesting because I think when most people think of motivation, we think of it.

on a larger scale, like a big picture scale. What are your projects for the year? How much do you wanna try those projects? And then that's maybe why you train. But we're talking about within a task, aren't we? Or within a belt of exercise. Yeah, so what I like about Bream's Motivational Intensity Theory is that it quantifies motivation rather than looks at the qualitative aspects of motivation. Obviously in itself it has limitations with looking at it in a quantitative manner, but.

It's a really interesting way of looking at motivation compared to like the self -determination theory or other motivational theories, which are very much about the quality, as you say, goal related. So it's a very different way of looking at it, which is useful when you're trying to bring it into physiology and performance. Okay. Yeah. So immediately I can already see a reason why this would be a limiter or there's areas of which this could limit performance, which are not related to your physiological.

you know, recruitment of the muscle fibers. If you're not motivated within a specific task or you perceive a high level of exertion, it's going to limit your performance, right? Yeah, that's correct. And what's good about these two areas is that you can change them. So your perception of effort, you can change it by training. So you get better and fitter. So that effort feels easier in the future. And then potential motivation. And so I...

base a lot of my coaching around this potential motivation and understanding what makes my clients tick. So once I know what makes my clients tick, I can manipulate the environment to make it more related to them so it can raise that potential motivation ceiling.