Cyclists' Brain Cycling: An fMRI Study

Functional and structural changes in the brain have been associated with regular aerobic exercise and expertise in several sports. A variety of neuroimaging techniques have revealed changes in brain activation with increased exercise intensity; however, how expertise modulates neural activation is still unclear for some sports, like cycling. Using an adapted cycling MRI ergometer, we compared the neural patterns of cycling experts and non-cyclists during cycling periods of different intensities. 22 participants were divided into two groups: 12 healthy adults who performed physical activity 4-6 h/week and 10 trained cyclists (>2 yrs of training and competitive experience, cycling 4-6 days/week for ˜60 min). The participants performed an incremental test on an adapted cycling MRI ergometer while whole-brain activity was recorded with functional MRI. Using a one-sample t-test (p11.1), while the cerebellum and insular cortex were activated only in cyclists (ts>6.83). In addition, both groups had inhibition of prefrontal cortical areas (ts>7.44) during cycling, but the non-cyclists had larger areas of the prefrontal cortex inhibited (ts>7.52). ycling expertise impacts the modulation of subcortical and prefrontal brain areas during cycling. We believe that these findings suggest that regular practice of cycling may enhance the neural regulation of cognitive, motor and homeostatic resources during exercise at different intensities, which may explain the higher performance of cycling athletes51937938Annual Meeting of the American-College-of-Sports-Medicine (ACSM