Progressing your athlete’s cognitive training plan is essential for continued development and adaptability. Once you’ve collected and assessed their baseline data, the next step is to refine the training plan to match their evolving cognitive needs. This ensures the brain remains challenged and continues to adapt to new stimuli, just like the body does in physical training.
As with physical workouts, cognitive training should never stay static. If an athlete is performing well across all tasks, it’s a clear sign their brain has adapted to the current level of difficulty. This signals that the training load is no longer sufficient and needs to be progressed. The goal is to keep the brain under enough pressure to stimulate change — that’s where true improvement happens.
When creating the next phase of cognitive training, the approach should be informed by performance data. If the previous cycle emphasized attention and inhibition, and the athlete is still underperforming in attention-based tasks, those areas should be prioritized. A helpful structure is to use a task ratio — for example, 2:1 or 3:1 — where weaker areas receive more emphasis while stronger tasks are still maintained. This approach keeps the training balanced while ensuring the most critical weaknesses are being addressed head-on.
It’s important to remember that cognitive training isn’t only about reinforcing what athletes are already good at. In fact, the most progress often comes from focusing on what they struggle with. Tasks that are harder for the athlete will naturally induce more mental fatigue — and that’s a good thing. Mental fatigue is a key driver of adaptation. The more demanding the task, the more it challenges the brain’s limits, resulting in greater resilience and performance gains over time.
Encouraging athletes to lean into their weaknesses can be difficult, much like asking someone to push through a grueling workout. But those challenging moments are exactly where growth happens. By designing sessions that include difficult, mentally fatiguing tasks, you’re building not just skill, but also mental toughness. Over time, this leads to improved performance not only in isolated tasks but also in high-pressure, real-world scenarios where cognitive resilience is critical.
To make this process effective, it’s important to establish a clear structure for progression. Start by identifying which cognitive areas require the most improvement and build the plan around those. Use regular assessments to track performance and gather insights into what’s working and what’s not. This allows you to adjust the intensity, duration, or type of cognitive tasks in response to the athlete’s development.
The process should be dynamic. As the athlete adapts, the plan evolves. Performance data should drive decision-making, ensuring the training plan remains relevant and effective. This cycle of implementation, monitoring, and adjustment is what keeps the training sharp and impactful.
In summary, progressing a cognitive training plan involves three key steps:
Assess Baseline Data – Identify the athlete’s current strengths and weaknesses.
Optimize the Plan – Use a data-driven approach to focus on weaker areas while maintaining strengths.
Implement, Monitor, and Adjust – Incorporate challenging cognitive tasks, monitor results, and adapt the plan regularly based on performance trends.