This guide is your roadmap to designing an effective cognitive training plan for your athletes with Soma. Learn how to strategically implement and adapt tasks, ensuring that your athletes' training evolves with their needs.

Starting cognitive training involves more than just selecting exercises—it requires a strategic approach. The plan must address the individual’s unique needs, keep them engaged, and consistently challenge them to prevent plateaus. Before diving into designing a cognitive training plan, let's briefly review how traditional methods have evolved.

Historically, cognitive training relied on standardized tasks with fixed intervals, leading to quick adaptation and limited effectiveness. At Soma, we’ve shifted this approach by focusing on flexibility and personalization. Our training modes, developed with top universities, allow you to adjust tasks to maintain optimal cognitive load.

Research shows that cognitive training is most effective when it continuously challenges the athlete, preventing them from becoming comfortable or complacent.

The foundation of an effective cognitive training plan lies in focusing on the right cognitive demands. Selecting the appropriate cognitive demand is more crucial than the specific task itself, and ensuring sufficient cognitive load is key to driving progress.

At Soma, we enable you to manipulate any task to make it more challenging. For instance, if you’re focusing on attention and assign a Posner task, it may seem simple in its traditional format. However, increasing the cognitive load by having the athlete maintain heart rate zone 4 or using a training mode that speeds up the task as performance improves makes it much more demanding.

The focus should always be on the cognitive demand and load rather than the task itself. With Soma, you can modify tasks as needed to meet the required challenge, so there’s no need to worry about finding the perfect task.

Here’s a breakdown of common cognitive demands:

Once you’ve identified the cognitive demands for your plan, the next step is to conduct a baseline test to assess the individual’s current abilities.

To accurately assess an individual’s cognitive abilities, start with a baseline test. Think of this test as a diagnostic tool that identifies cognitive strengths and weaknesses. The main purpose is to gather crucial data that will help you design a more personalized and effective training plan.

Test Duration:

We recommend a test lasting at least 30 minutes. This duration is long enough to challenge the brain and reveal any cognitive deficits. A shorter test might not provide enough data, leading to inaccurate assessments and poor decision-making.

Task Selection:

Select 3 to 6 tasks that closely align with the cognitive demands you want to focus on. We suggest around 4 tasks to avoid overwhelming the athlete. These tasks should target specific cognitive demands, helping you gather the necessary data for your training program.

Using the Baseline:

The baseline test is an information-gathering tool. It highlights areas of strength and difficulty. For instance, if an athlete excels in decision-making but struggles with response inhibition, their training should include a greater emphasis on inhibition tasks compared to decision-making tasks. A practical approach could be to incorporate two inhibition tasks for every decision-making task. This strategy ensures that while their decision-making skills are maintained, their weaker areas are actively being strengthened.

As you re-test, look for clues in the data—improvements in speed, accuracy, or consistency can guide your next steps. Don’t overthink the baseline; it’s simply a tool to help you create a more effective plan.

The next step is deciding how to integrate the plan into the athlete’s training regime. Here are your options:

Perform cognitive tasks before physical training. This approach pre-exhausts the brain, making the physical workout feel more intense due to the increased perception of effort caused by mental fatigue. This method amplifies the physical challenge ahead.

Incorporate cognitive tasks into the rest periods between physical training sets. This increases the overall training load of the session.

Perform cognitive tasks while doing cardiovascular training within a specific heart rate zone. This strategy seamlessly integrates cognitive and physical training, maximizing time efficiency, aiding in rehabilitation, or even enhancing a cardiovascular-only training session by increasing the overall training load.

Complete cognitive tasks after physical training. This method leverages residual mental fatigue to push cognitive boundaries further, making it ideal for those looking to challenge their mental capacity without disrupting the flow of their physical training session.

After running your baseline test and determining how to integrate tasks into the athlete’s training, it’s time to select the right tasks. This step can feel overwhelming with so many options available, but the key is to choose tasks that align with the athlete’s specific goals and cognitive demands.

As previously mentioned, use your baseline data to guide these choices. For instance, if an athlete excels in decision-making but struggles with response inhibition, you should place greater emphasis on inhibition tasks. If a task becomes too easy or you suspect you may have underloaded your athlete, don’t replace it—adjust its difficulty or apply a training mode to increase the cognitive load. This approach ensures that the training remains adaptive and effective, continuously challenging the athlete while addressing their specific needs.

🛠️ Click here to learn about all of Soma's training modes—when to use them and why

Next, we’ll cover periodization, which adjusts cognitive load using progressive overload or undulating periodization.

Two key methodologies in cognitive training periodization are Progressive Overload and Undulating Periodization. Both methods are adapted from physical training principles, each with its unique benefits:

Together, these strategies provide a robust framework for enhancing cognitive performance, ensuring that training remains challenging, engaging, and effective over the long term.

Progressive Overload is a fundamental concept derived from physical training, where the load on the muscles is gradually increased to stimulate growth and strength. When applied to cognitive training, this concept involves systematically increasing the cognitive demands placed on the brain. By continuously raising the intensity, duration, and frequency of cognitive tasks, the brain is pushed to adapt, leading to improvements in cognitive function.

This method is particularly effective in enhancing neural capacity, decision-making under fatigue, and multitasking abilities. By gradually increasing the cognitive load, individuals can stretch their mental capacities, ensuring that the brain remains agile and capable of handling cognitive demands in high-pressure situations.

Begin with tasks set at an intensity of 60-70%, increasing by 10% each week to reach 90-100% by the fourth week. This gradual increase ensures a higher overall cognitive load, effectively enhancing mental resilience and capacity over time as athletes perform more reps within the task's duration. As intensity rises, they will complete these reps at a faster speed.

Table 1: Intensity Progression Over Weeks

Start with a session duration of 20 minutes in the first week, increasing by 5 minutes each week to reach 35 minutes by the fourth week. This gradual extension ensures that athletes build cognitive endurance, allowing them to maintain high levels of performance over longer periods.

Table 2: Session Duration Increment Over Weeks

Start with two training sessions in the first week, adding one additional session each week to reach five sessions by the fourth week. This gradual increase conditions the brain to handle frequent cognitive challenges, enhancing its adaptability and recovery capacity.

Table 3: Frequency of Training Sessions Over Weeks

Undulating Periodization is a training strategy that systematically varies the intensity, volume, and frequency of cognitive tasks on a regular basis. Unlike linear periodization, which follows a straightforward progression, undulating periodization introduces waves of varying training intensities. This dynamic approach helps prevent adaptation plateaus and keeps the brain engaged by providing diverse cognitive stimuli.

By continuously adjusting the cognitive load, undulating periodization ensures that the brain remains adaptable, ultimately enhancing cognitive flexibility and resilience.

Vary the intensity of cognitive tasks daily or weekly to consistently challenge the brain. This approach can include alternating between high-intensity tasks that demand maximum cognitive effort and lower-intensity tasks that allow for recovery. For example, begin the week with high-intensity tasks, then gradually taper to moderate or low-intensity tasks toward the end of the week. This variation ensures the brain remains adaptable and resilient, balancing cognitive load with adequate recovery.

Table 1: Daily Variation of Task Intensity Over a Week

Table 2: Weekly Average Task Intensity Over a 4-Week Period

Adjust the duration of cognitive training sessions regularly to prepare the brain for both prolonged periods of effort and shorter, more intense bursts of activity. For example, one day might involve longer sessions, such as 60 minutes, while the next day could focus on shorter, more intense sessions, like 20 minutes. This variation ensures the brain can handle different types of cognitive demands, enhancing both endurance and responsiveness.

Table 3: Daily Variation of Session Duration Over a Week

Table 4: Weekly Average Session Duration Over a 4-Week Period

Alternate the number of training sessions each week to balance cognitive load and recovery. This approach keeps the brain sharp and adaptable while preventing mental fatigue. For example, some weeks may feature dense training schedules with multiple sessions, while other weeks focus more on recovery with fewer sessions. This variation ensures that the brain remains challenged without becoming overworked, promoting sustained cognitive performance and resilience.

Table 5: Task Frequency in Undulating Periodization

This section explains how varying the intensity of cognitive tasks affects the total number of responses during different session durations. As intensity increases, the delay between stimuli decreases, leading to a higher overall load (reps per minute). The table below demonstrates that as intensity rises, the number of reps increases significantly. Additionally, it highlights how session duration impacts the total number of reps. By increasing either intensity or duration, the total cognitive load escalates, similar to how volume accumulates in physical training over time.

To clarify, here’s how response rate translates to the time interval between responses:

This breakdown helps visualize how reducing the time between responses (increasing intensity) significantly raises the total cognitive load.

The following table shows the total number of responses achieved during sessions of varying lengths (20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes, 50 minutes, and 60 minutes) at different response rates, ranging from 45 to 120 responses per minute:

Design just three sessions, then copy and paste them across your plan, adjusting only the intensity. This way, you only need a baseline and three sessions to build a complete program.

Each session repeats weekly for four weeks, with increasing intensity for more reps each time.

Keep sessions to 20-25 minutes, max 30 minutes.

By following this approach, the first week of the new plan acts as a deloading phase, helping maintain momentum while easing into the new structure.

Find below examples of Progressive Overload and Undulating Periodization strategies where intensity is manipulated week by week. These examples are designed to be practical, especially when time is limited, as adjusting intensity each week is one of the most straightforward methods. Additionally, the tasks include different modes, adding another layer of load to make the sessions more customized and challenging.