Welcome to the home of Cerebral Performance. I am Scott H. Frey, Ph.D., Ed.M., an award-winning scientist, mentor, and lifelong endurance athlete. For over 30 years I led an internationally renowned research program that focused on understanding the complex relationship between the brain and human performance.  My experiences as a scientist and serious athlete convinced me that the brain holds enormous, and largely overlooked, potential to revolutionize athletic performance.

Frustrated by the exclusively neck down approach of sport science, I left my career in academia and started Cerebral Performance to help individuals and teams harness the brain in their quest for excellence. My clients range from highly motivated age-groupers to experienced professionals. Current Cerebral Performance athletes include elite National Champions, veteran Olympians, National Team members in several countries, and riders in the domestic and European pelotons. In all cases, they are driven by an insuppressible need to discover their true performance limits, and recognize that the optimizing the brain can make the difference difference between success and failure.

What I Do

The video at the top of this page presents data that I captured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), an extraordinary technique that was key to my research. It shows the specific brain networks that are activated when we imagine precise hand actions.

Even while lying totally motionless, our thoughts are capable of stimulating activity within brain networks involved in planning and controlling our movements. If we were to repeatedly train using these imagery exercises, the activated brain networks that you see would adapt by becoming stronger and more efficient. As a consequence, our ability to actually perform these imagined actions would become more accurate, faster, and less variable.

I show this to you in oder to make a very important point. Each of us possess the remarkable ability to change the function and structure of our brains through our behaviors. Analogous to how a muscle adapts to the demands of strength training, brain systems become stronger, faster and more efficient with exercise. I spent several decades investigating how best to harness this extraordinary capacity (known as “neuroplasticity”) in order to optimize mental and physical performance. This expertise is foundational to my Neck Down approach to high performance.

What this all means in practice is that I teach athletes how to leverage a wide variety of behavioral techniques that have been scientifically demonstrated to drive adaptations in brain functions that are critical to optimizing race performances and recovery.

Because no two athletes are the same, my work is highly individualized, and ranges broadly depending on the goals and unique needs of my clients. Here is a sampling of some of the more common things that we have focused on:

• Establishing the Zone of Optimal Functioning and training athletes to reliably enter this performance sweetspot through self-modulation of their autonomic nervous systems
• Quantitative tracking and remediation of the performance-compromising effects of central (brain) fatigue
• Building fatigue resistance in performance-critical brain functions including situational awareness, sustained attention, task switching, response inhibition, rapid decision making, and emotional regulation.
• Raising the ceiling on functional capacity through training modifications that recalibrate brain systems involved in perceived exertion
• Leveraging the brain’s reward circuitry to increase motivation, tenacity, and willpower
• Optimizing the perceptual, cognitive, and emotional effects of data and real-time feedback on performance
• Developing automaticity in performance-critical motor and cognitive skills
• Leveraging key neurotransmitter systems in the brain to improve pain tolerance and develop greater resilience under conditions of high stress
• Identifying and eliminating cognitive distortions and misperceptions that negatively impact self confidence and performance
• Quantifying the cognitive effects of concussion and designing individualized rehabilitation to optimize the speed and extent of recovery
• Planning for, and successfully navigating, the transition from professional sport

Like all training, getting this recipe correct is both a science and an art. Beyond scientific expertise, it requires experience, a willingness to experiment, and commitment to the process. The key principles at work here are, however, familiar to coaches and experienced athletes alike — consistency, periodization, specificity, progressive overload, and adequate recovery. 

Strengthening the Foundation. Training and competition are significant sources of stress. Likewise, stressors outside of athletics can also have a profound impact on our ability to perform. Helping athletes to identify and manage these effectively is of paramount importance to their success and is central to my work. This requires our developing a collaborative relationship based on open communication, trust, accessibility, and mutual respect.

If this sounds interesting, you are welcome to contact me at the email address below. We can set a time to discuss your interests and goals, and see whether I may be able to help. Use the form below to drop me a note.

Testimonials