If you’re looking to improve your time trialling, there are probably better ways to go about it.
Image: Vielight
Cyclists tend to do some pretty weird and wonderful things in the hope of improving performance. We’ll try any supplement or diet trend with even the faintest promise of improvement, we’ll tinker with and tweak our bikes until the cows come home, and we’ll try all sorts of strange tech in the hope of accessing even the most marginal of gains.
But what about shining a bunch of light through your skull and up your nose, into your brain, all in the hope of improving time trial performance? Yep, you read that right.
What is PBM?
As you might be able to tell from the name, photobiomodulation (or PBM) is a technique that involves shining light into the body in order to stimulate various effects. The light used is in the red to near-infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum – normally with wavelengths between 600 and 1,100 nm – and depending on what sort of tissue you point that light at, it can generate a range of different outcomes.
Point it at muscle tissue and it’s possible to induce an increase in oxygen demand which can ultimately lead to improved performance in time-to-exhaustion tests. Directing it at the muscles also seems to help with the repair of those muscles, due to a “reduction in the inflammatory process”. And it turns out that transcranial PBM – that is, firing those infrared lights through your skull and into your brain cells – can both enhance cognitive abilities in healthy brains, and also has some potential when it comes to treating neurodegenerative conditions including Alzheimer’s disease.
So how does it work exactly? To simplify a rather complex process, the absorption of infrared light within the brain cells seems to lead to increased blood flow in the brain, in addition to enhanced hemoglobin oxygenation (you might recall that hemoglobin is the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the body’s tissues). These factors, in turn, lead to increased activation of the brain areas targeted by the PBM.
Oxygenation levels in the brain are also relevant if we’re talking about exercise performance. Various studies have shown that a drop in cerebral oxygenation during high-intensity exercise is associated with exhaustion and that deoxygenation of the prefrontal cortex in particular seems to contribute to “the cessation of exercise” during controlled and self-paced efforts.
So if there’s a link between oxygenation levels in the brain and exercise performance, could it be that increasing oxygenation in the brain – via a technique like PBM – might help improve cycling performance?
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