The effect of intermittent theta burst stimulation applied to the primary motor cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex on running performance in endurance-trained runners
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Increasing cortical excitability has been studied to enhance athletic performance for over a decade, but its effectiveness remains unknown, particularly in endurance running.The current literature contains discrepancies regarding optimal parameters, including stimulation site, testing protocols and outcome measures.Few studies have investigated the effect of stimulating multiple sites to address the various factors that contribute to running performance.Historically, the motor cortex (M1) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) have been targeted due to their roles in both the physical and cognitive aspects of performance.For testing protocols, studies have examined the effects of increasing excitability using laboratory-based methods, such as time to exhaustion tests on cycle ergometers or treadmills, rather than overground running assessments that better reflect a natural environment for runners.Additionally, total time may not fully capture all aspects of performance that change throughout a run.Targeting multiple brain regions and utilizing an overground running task that evaluates multiple performance metrics throughout the run may provide greater insight into the effect of increasing excitability.Therefore, this thesis aims to investigate the impacts of increasing cortical excitability through intermittent theta burst stimulation (iTBS) targeted to the M1, DLPFC, and both M1 and DLPFC compared to sham on total time, speed, rating of perceived exertion (RPE) and spatiotemporal parameters and variability in endurance-trained runners during an exhaustive 3,000m time-trial run.We hypothesized that iTBS applied to the M1 leg and DLPFC would enhance performance by measures of faster completion times, faster speeds, reduced RPE and decreased spatiotemporal variability.Ten endurance-trained runners (7 males, 3 females, age: 26 7 years, height: 1.75 0.92 m, body mass: 65 10 kg, years of training: 85) were included in the analysis.Runners underwent four separate sessions in randomized order: iTBS of both M1 and DLPFC, iTBS of M1 and sham stimulation of DLPFC, sham stimulation of M1 and iTBS of DLPFC, and sham stimulation of both M1 and DLPFC.After stimulation, runners performed the 3,000m time-trial run on an indoor track.RPE was taken every three laps.Spatiotemporal measures of stride time (ST), step frequency (SF), stride length (SL) and duty factor (DF) were collected through APDM opal sensors.Speed, magnitude of spatiotemporal parameters, and their coefficient of variation (CV) were analyzed in three phases of the run: initial, steady state and final acceleration.Although significance was not reached, the M1+DLPFC condition produced the fastest time, nearly 3 seconds faster than sham and 1 second faster than stimulation of either area alone.Speed was significantly faster in the
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".