HOW SCIENCE MAKES YOU A BETTER RIDER
Can brain stimulation power an Alpine cycling tour? Cycling Plus heads to the high mountains to find out
An electrical storm was raging – and it was getting into my head. We were all set to start our ride at the foot of the Colle delle Finestre, the colossus of the Cottian Alps, in the village of Meana di Susa, the mountain where, almost exactly a year earlier, Chris Froome had staged the ride of his life at the Giro d’Italia. Rain wasn’t so much falling from the sky as cascading. Thunder was pounding to ear drum-bursting e ect and lightning illuminated a morning sky that had eerily descended into darkness. Debates were ongoing about whether it was safe to head up the mountain (summit: 2178m), or to plot an alternative, lower path through the valley. The latter got my vote: the feeling of terror, exposed at the summit of the Col d’Izoard in 2015 in such conditions, has left me never wanting to experience it again.
Yet this wasn’t the only electrical storm in my mind. Alongside all the pulling on of Lycra, fettling of bikes and filling up of bidons within the Roman ruins of Meana di Susa, electrodes were being attached to my head by Dr Elisabetta Geda. Through them, an electrical current would be
piped into my brain through a process called tDCS or, transcranial direct current stimulation. This was a science experiment at the scene of artistry.
Anyone who’s climbed a mountain will know the physical and mental anguish involved. A bargain to lessen the ordeal is an easy one to make and the invitation by Neurofire, a division of Turin-based rehabilitation centre IRR, the Istituto delle Riabilitazoni (itself part of the CIDIMU group), to try out tDCS was RSVP’d quickly. The idea was to ride their Mind Over Mountains tour, from Turin, through the Italian and French Alps – and over a series of cols including the
Galibier, Izoard and Agnel – and back again, via the vineyards of the Langhe Valley, while taking “pro-conditioning neurostimulation to improve power and performance” and “sampling Europe’s best wines and artisanal chocolate”. A glass or two of Barbaresco in an evening was a welcome bonus, but in truth they had me at Galibier.
Mind over mountains
TDCS is a non-invasive, painless treatment that stimulates specific parts of the brain, increasing a neuron’s resting baseline state, resulting in a reduction in the amount of stimuli required for it to fire. Treatment benefits may include increased endurance, deeper concentration, better coordination and the ability to overcome mental and physical fatigue.
While it sounds cutting-edge, the roots of it go back to the Greco-Roman period of 395 AD. Now, in the 21st century, advances in brain imaging and electrical engineering have seen tDCS make a comeback – and it has even hit the mainstream. It’s used clinically to treat the symptoms of diseases, such as multiple sclerosis (to treat fatigue) and stroke rehab, in re-learning motor skills and speech; now it’s also being used in healthy individuals as those involved in the world of sport seek gains in performance. Commercially, Halo Neuroscience uses tDCS in its headphones, which it says can improve the ability of skills as diverse as cycling sprinting and learning a new language.
It’s also popping up in pro cycling. IRR is the sports medicine clinic of Vincenzo Nibali’s Bahrain-Merida team and several of its riders have used tDCS as part of their armoury, notably climber Domenico Pozzovivo, who used it primarily as part of his recovery during the 2018 Giro d’Italia, where his fifth place was a careerbest ride. “Most of all, I’ve used it to improve the quality of sleep and stimulate the systems that control relaxation,” says Pozzovivo. “After an intense e ort, such as the very hard stages of the Giro, it’s a struggle to relax but [tDCS] has improved my quality of sleep.”
Like Pozzovivo, we would use it post-ride, during massage, as well as directly before the ride. Post-ride treatment targets the primary motor cortex (generator of neural impulses that controls movement) during an active recovery, like massage. Dr Geda says tDCS improves the readiness of the body to recover from exertion.
Pre-ride treatment targets the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (which is involved in memory and action, serving as a bridge between input
NOW, IN THE 21ST CENTURY, ADVANCES IN BRAIN IMAGING AND ELECTRICAL ENGI NEERI NG HAVE SEEN TDCS MAKE A COMEBACK
and output) – tDCS floods the region with electric charge and lowers the levels required for excitation during activity. This is said to increase neuroplasticity (how your brain develops as it’s exposed to new information), allowing neurons to build connections. One of the primary benefits of this treatment, according to Geda, is an improved tolerance to fatigue. “There is strong evidence that our endurance of fatigue is regulated by a variety of psychological factors. Signals of exhaustion, sent to the brain from the body, pass through a network of motivation, reward and goalorientated centres in the brain… the prefrontal cortex makes the final determination in terms of the degree of tolerance an athlete is willing to accept regarding the continuation of activity.” There appears to be a short window of around 45 minutes to an hour where studies have shown tDCS can aid subsequent performance, which is why it’s been used before short e orts like time trials. However, Dr Geda says it should be looked at like training itself – there’s a layering e ect whereby the more you do it, the more e ective it becomes. And, like training, the changes will be so gradual that you won’t notice a change in real time. Current women’s Hour Record holder Vittoria Bussi, who joined us for a ride in the hills of Turin before we headed o into the high mountains, has recently started working with the IRR to receive tDCS, but said it was too early to know if it was making a di erence.
It was too early for us to know too. We did make it up the Finestre, but between the first round of tDCS finishing and the storm calming down, the window for it to have any e ect had closed and we were alone and exposed on the climb armed with only the legs we brought to it. I was already in awe of Froome’s Finestre theatrics, but climbing it for the first time brought new respect for the achievement – television pictures don’t do the final eight kilometres of unpaved road justice, it is a real dog’s dinner of a surface. My new 28mm tubeless Giant tyres on my Giant Defy Advanced Pro 1 had cuts all over them at the summit.
Riding up, there were signs that the rain we had down below in the valley had fallen a fair bit firmer higher up, and stopping by the refuge just over the summit, the sta there showed us a video of a hailstorm that might have broken bones had we been out in it. The refuge is a co-operative, with the building owned by the government and operated by locals serving up a tasty array of cheese and cured meat. The man in charge today
THERE IS STRONG EVI DENCE THAT OUR ENDURANCE OF FATIGUE IS REGULATED BY A VARIETY OF PSYCHOLOGI CAL FACTORS
was from Rajasthan, and we asked, via a translator, how he got all the way from the bustling streets of Jaipur to the desolate summit of the Colle delle Finestre? By plane, came the deadpan answer.
Bri ght sparks
Day three, and the ‘Queen Stage’ of the tour, over the Col d’Izoard and Col Agnel, was where it really got going. The winter of 2018/19 was a cold, snowy one for the Alps and its high passes, here in the second week of June, were only just opening after weeks of intensive, dangerous work by those tasked with shifting it. After a stormy day one, day two, which took us over a blizzard-hit Galibier, was a near write-o , so we were at once intrigued and confused by the prospects o ered by this bright, yellow orb in the sky that greeted us when we drew the curtains in a brisk Briançon.
Today we’d receive our dose of tDCS in the evening post-ride over the Italian border in Sampeyre, during a massage. I could be forgiven for feeling rather nonplussed by it all so far, given the two sessions had been followed by two stopstart rides, but Dr Geda, who was performing the treatment, wanted us to know that tDCS isn’t some e “superdrug” that’s going to give an immediate, , noticeable boost to performance – this is a training aid, she said, that gives incremental improvements. veme ts. But what can it o er to cyclists?
The research so far is equivocal, with e ects varying both across and within individuals, with th findings dependent on what part of the brain is targeted. In an opinion piece from 2017 published ish in FrontiersinHumanNeuroscience, Edwards et al (Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation and Sports Performance) said that “it remains to be conclusively determined whether it can improve sports performance at an elite level”, but that it could be added to a category of safe approaches that influence the brain, such as meditation and visualisation, that may improve performance.
One study that does suggest benefits of tDCS was Okano et al (2013); 10 trained cyclists, after 20 minutes of anodal (positive) tDCS current to the temporal cortex (the processor of sensory information), completed a maximal ramp test. Peak power output increased by four per cent, while heart rate and perceived exertion decreased at submaximal workloads.
Four per cent at elite level, where performance gains are squeezed out in the law of diminishing returns, is hefty, and you can see why elite athletes who’ve run out of road when it comes to marginal gains would be willing to give it a go. I, on the other hand, could benefit to the tune of four per
I T PROVI DED AN INSIGHT INTO AN AVENUE PRO CYCLI NGS HEADI NG DOWN IN PURSUIT OF PERFORMANCE GAI NS
cent by forgoing that third glass of Bordeaux at dinner, something I declined to do in Briançon on the eve of the Izoard/Agnel double. Tourissimo, the Italian travel company leading our passage through the Alps, put food and drink, and an education of the local gastronomy where the tours take their guests, at the heart of what they do. Which gets two thumbs up from me. But when you throw them together with the doctors at the IRR, you get one hell of a juxtaposition, whereby the latter sends £10,000 of cutting-edge kit through your brain and the former phones ahead to that evening’s restaurant to have them decant in good order a 2013 vintage Barolo.
Forget brain stimulation, by the summit of the Agnel, the third highest pass in the Alps at 2744m, I was catatonic. A fierce headwind had blown hard through the valley in its long, straight lower slopes and, with altitude, it combined to bring me to a near standstill in the final few kilometres. The pass had opened just a few days earlier and the towering snow walls were imposing to ride through. Still, I’d made it, with the scalps of two of France’s biggest cols in my jersey pocket, and on my mind now was how the post-ride treatment would set me up for the ride up the devilish Colle di Sampeyre (15.6km at 8.5 per cent) the following morning.
The Sampeyre (altitude: 2284m), a new one on me, is a truly hideous foe, a bumpy, consistently steep and narrow road, which is engulfed by trees for much of its length. Its summit is stunning, however, with wonderful views on a clear day of Monte Viso, the summit of the Cottian Alps at 3841m). From here, it was all downhill, and we’d leave the high mountains behind with a long descent into the valley on our way to Alba, the city 60km south east of Turin and the birthplace of Nutella – a product you don’t need research to prove could most definitely power an Alpine cycling tour.
But did tDCS stimulate our brain? It’s almost impossible to tell. This wasn’t a controlled, labbased experiment, we didn’t measure changes over time, or compare e orts on various climbs. Experimentation in a field like this is fraught with issues. If tDCS did improve our endurance and concentration, our ability to tolerate fatigue and get better sleep, I’m not in a position to say after five days of treatment. All I can say is that the science suggests it might.
It did, however, provide insight into an avenue pro cycling is heading down in pursuit of performance gains. When they’ve squeezed every pip in terms of extracting gains from their bodies, the brain, where there’s much to learn, o ers hope.