twice beaten Tyson Fury<\/a> and Anthony Joshua – but his preparations never centre around the opponent.<\/p>\nInstead, Usyk is put under immense physical fatigue before being tasked with mental tests to strengthen his ability to think on the spot when he’s in the ring.<\/p>\n
During tough physical workouts, Usyk is asked to solve a Schulte table, which is a grid filled with numbers or letters that need to be ordered into a specific sequence.<\/p>\n
Another task is juggling balls with the purpose of keeping his mind focused as he recovers from a period of cardio training.<\/p>\n
“We know everything about Usyk’s physiology and how his body works under different stresses,” Chycki added.<\/p>\n
“We know how we should read his signals and symptoms. We didn’t change anything.<\/p>\n
“We have a round table every Saturday and look at what we’ve done and what needs to change. We don’t change to the opponents’ strategy.”<\/p>\n
One of the major health risks concerned with boxing is chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) – a brain condition linked to repeated blows to the head and concussion. CTE leads to dementia and can only be diagnosed post-mortem.<\/p>\n
Chycki suggested one of the reasons they monitor Usyk and do cognitive training is to help with the “prevention of brain injury”.<\/p>\n
But Dr Thom Wilcockson, a senior lecturer of psychology at Loughborough University, says the scientific evidence is not strong enough to suggest cognitive training prevents CTE.<\/p>\n
“It would add a robustness against fatigue induced cognitive decline but not necessarily the long-term effects that CTE could cause,” he said.<\/p>\n
“It would give Usyk a larger cognitive reserve which might help mitigate other types of dementia like Alzheimer’s disease.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The reward for a second win over Briton Dubois is a place in a very elite club as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":266976,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4108],"tags":[1935,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-266975","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-boxing","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114863773093102473","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266975\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}