In today’s Classlete Podcast episode 003 we chat with a sports dad/coach, researcher, writer and an observer of sports neuroscience, Dan Peterson.

Dan is the Director of U.S. Business Development for www.MetriFit.com, the online performance tracking system for club and college athletes.

He also runs a blog at www.80PercentMental.com, which was created in 2010 to study the latest cognitive science research for clues on how to improve an athlete’s brain processes, including vision, reaction, perception, learning, and decision making.

Listen to this episode and think about this question – how many times you have heard a coach or even a player blame a “mental mistake” for poor results?

Did you know that a base-running error, an unrecognized blitz or a bad pass originates in the athlete’s brain and ends with the wrong signals being sent to those well-conditioned muscles?

At his blog you can find over 250 science-based articles to help you understand not only the brain but to also gain access to real world tips and tricks to improve your “sports cognition”.

In this 30 minute episode, Dan and I discuss:

• Why having lazy parents may have put you at a competitive disadvantage genetically
• What Peyton Manning, Aaron Rodgers and LeBron James all have in common
• The definition and importance of an athlete’s intangibles and how they are measured
• What factor does stress, ego and fatigue play in the athlete and what MetriFit.com is doing about it
• Whether or not jocks are smart and fatigue fighting tips
• What young athletes, parents and coaches fail to understand about achieving mental toughness
• Why rudimentary coaching needs to evolve to understanding the athlete’s brain as much as they do the athlete’s body
• And the number 1 thing student athletes must do to obtain an edge in the classroom academically (HINT – it’s a protein called BDNF)

Be sure to check out Dan on Twitter, his blog www.80PercentMental.com and www.Metrifit.com.

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