Field notes on braining and biking
Observations from the intersection of Performance Studies, Cognitive Science, Anthropology, Philosophy, and the continual joy of riding a mountain bike. Part story, part research-infused insight and entirely designed to help you learn more about your own unique skills and processing style on the trails and off them.
These posts are shared in my monthly-ish newsletter, The Cognitive Advantage, along with news, offers, and useful tips. You can join the newsletter community here.
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Making good decisions when you can’t see the full picture
The moral of this story is that you don’t need to see everything, or know everything, or be able to do everything to make a good decision or achieve your goals. A robust strategy allows for multiple ways of gathering information, leaning on others, and adding a buffer for that first leap of faith.
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Unlocking efficient performance: how trail cues improve your mountain biking
Good cues make us mentally efficient by narrowing our focus into the part of the movement that helps the rest of it flow. They free up our minds from monitoring or assessing a thousand other factors that contribute to how we move well, safely, and at speed.
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Highlights from recent MTB workshops and events
The feedback from these workshops and talks over the last couple of months has been more overwhelmingly positive than I could have hoped for – confirmation that diverse types of riders and industry professionals are able to take this knowledge and run with it (or ride with it!) to respond to challenges of their own,…
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How mountain biking builds more than physical health
This post is your reminder that time spent riding (or walking or climbing, or lifting, or fishing, or snorkelling…) is full of surprises in how it gives forward to other parts of your life. So keep making time for it.
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The power of one change
At the heart of everything I do with Intelligent Action is the idea that what we think isn’t just something that happens in a brain, but something that happens in a body, in a place, with tools and technology, with other people, and in different contexts. Change one element and you’ll impact the others.
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How watching others enhances your mountain biking performance
We don’t only learn through doing something, or even by practising each element of a movement step by step. Sometimes the leaps we make – that take us from wondering how to do something to working out how to do it – come from watching others.
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Mastering cues for peak performance
Cues are words, phrases, images, sensations and sounds that help to prompt our long-term memory, sharpen our focus, or coordinate complex series of body movements during a challenging task. They’re an incredibly efficient way of focusing on one very small thing that enables us to do a much bigger thing.
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Building Resilience Through Mountain Biking
“Outside of mountain biking, we’re building friends,” said multi-time 24-hour mountain bike champion and Hunter Schools MTB coach, Jason English. “We’re building resilience skills.” He explained that the kids and teens he coaches learn to encourage each other even when things get tough. “You see that they have to learn to speak positively and they…
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Braining, biking and how remarkably we adapt to change
Every bike ride is different. And our brains are incredible in how they enable us to work with these differences.
Intelligent Action 