Does lion's mane help you learn new lifts faster?

A new lift passes through three stages, and each stage is a different question: what the cognitive, associative and autonomous stages are, which memory system a lift is stored in, and why that decides the answer

Does lion's mane help you learn new lifts faster is a question about a process with a known structure, because every motor skill a person learns, a snatch, a hook grip, a hinge, a handstand, passes through three stages that have been described the same way since the 1960s, and each stage is moved by different things. The first is the cognitive stage: the lifter is working out what the movement even is, attention is entirely on the body, errors are large, frequent and conscious, and the lifter can usually say what went wrong. A first week of snatching lives here, with the bar looping forward, the feet landing wide, the arms pulling early, each rep different from the last. The second is the associative stage: the pattern exists, the gross errors are gone, and the work is refinement by feedback over hundreds of reps, the bar path tightening, the timing of the second pull settling, the errors becoming small, consistent and often invisible to the lifter until a camera or a coach shows them. Most of a lifter's learning life is spent here. The third is the autonomous stage: the lift runs without attention, survives fatigue, a noisy gym and a heavy load, and the lifter can think about the cue or the competition rather than the body, which is why a seasoned lifter's third attempt looks like their warm-up. Learning a lift faster means moving through the three stages in fewer sessions, and the question of whether anything helps has to be asked of each.

What a lift is stored in decides whether a cognitive supplement can touch any of the three. A lift is procedural memory: the how of a movement, built by doing, stored across the motor cortex, basal ganglia and cerebellum, and tested by performing the movement rather than by describing it, which is why a lifter can execute a clean they cannot explain and explain a clean they cannot execute. Declarative memory is the other system: the what of facts and events, built by encoding, stored through the hippocampus and the cortex it writes to, and tested by recall. The two systems have different brain bases, different time courses and different tests, and an intervention's effect on one implies nothing about the other, which is a settled point in the memory literature rather than a technicality; a person with hippocampal damage can learn a mirror-drawing skill at a normal rate while remembering nothing of the sessions. The one positive lion's mane trial, sixteen weeks of 3g a day of fruiting body powder in 30 older adults with mild cognitive impairment, measured a declarative scale, orientation, recall and reasoning, in a population whose problem was declarative. The young-adult pilot measured a Stroop task, stress and mood. No study of the mushroom has measured a motor skill, a finger-tapping sequence, a reaction task that becomes a skill with practice, or anything a coach would recognise as technique. The mushroom's evidence sits entirely in the system a lift is not stored in, and for a lifter's age it is one adjacent signal at sixty minutes that did not last four weeks.

What does move a lifter through the three stages faster: practice structure, feedback, external cues and the night after practice, and the honest buy

The variables that move the rate through the stages have been studied for decades with motor tasks, and four of them are usable in a gym tonight. The first is practice structure. In the cognitive stage, blocked practice, the same movement repeated in a row, builds the pattern fastest, which is why a first snatch session is sets of the same drill; in the associative stage, varied and random practice, mixing loads, tempos and related movements, produces slower progress within a session and better retention and transfer across sessions, which is the finding coaches know as the practice that feels worse and tests better. The second is feedback, and its timing: external feedback, a camera and a coach, is most useful in the associative stage, where the errors have become invisible to the lifter, and it works best when it is not given after every rep, since constant feedback produces reliance on it and withdrawing it produces a lift that falls apart. A camera on a phone propped against a plate is the cheapest associative-stage tool there is. The third is the cue, and its direction: an external cue, push the floor away, drive the bar to the ceiling, through the roof, produces better learning and better performance than an internal one, squeeze your glutes, extend your hips, across the motor learning literature, because attention directed to the effect of the movement lets the autonomous system organise the body while attention directed to the body itself interferes with it, which is the same finding as the ceiling on mind-muscle connection at heavy loads. The fourth is the largest and the least bought: sleep. A night of sleep after practising a motor sequence improves its speed by around twenty per cent the next day without a further rep, the consolidation that turns a session's practice into a stored skill, and sleep restriction removes the gain, so that a lifter who practises a new lift on a five-hour night has done the reps and lost the consolidation. For the motor side of the nervous system, sleep is the intervention that is measured, large and free, and the first question for a lifter whose new lift is not sticking is what time they went to bed after the sessions it was practised in.

Lion's mane is not a step on that route, and it is worth being exact about why rather than merely noting the absence of a study. The mushroom's one pharmacological story is a nerve growth factor signal in cultured cells and rodents that has never been measured in a human, and NGF is a survival and maintenance signal for particular neuron populations rather than a mechanism of motor consolidation, which runs on sleep-dependent replay in the motor cortex and striatum; there is no proposed route from the capsule to the process that stores a lift, let alone a tested one. Its human evidence is in declarative memory, in a population a lifter does not belong to, with the young-adult result an inhibition task at one time point. A lifter who wants a new lift faster has a coach or a camera for the associative stage, an external cue for every stage, blocked then varied practice in the right order, and a bedtime after each practice session that lets the consolidation run, and none of it costs 13p a day. The honest buy, for a lifter who wants the mushroom for the reasons the trials studied, is a capsule that makes no claim about either memory system: the worked example, {FLLM}, a stated 5:1 fruiting body extract labelled 1500mg mushroom equivalent per capsule, 120 days for £15.49 at 13p, UK made, independently lab tested, caffeine free and claim-free, with nothing on its label about learning, skill or technique, because nothing in the trials measured them.

What to check on the label

Questions people also ask

Does lion's mane help with learning new exercises or technique?

There is no evidence that it does, because learning a lift is procedural memory, the how of a movement stored across motor cortex, basal ganglia and cerebellum and tested by doing, and no human study of lion's mane has measured a motor skill, a sequence task or anything a coach would recognise as technique; the one positive trial measured declarative memory, orientation, recall and reasoning, in older adults with mild impairment, a different memory system with a different brain basis, and an effect on one system implies nothing about the other.

What are the three stages of learning a lift?

The cognitive stage, where the lifter is working out what the movement is, attention is entirely on the body and errors are large, frequent and conscious; the associative stage, where the pattern exists and is refined by feedback over hundreds of reps, with errors becoming small, consistent and invisible to the lifter until a camera or coach shows them; and the autonomous stage, where the lift runs without attention and survives fatigue, noise and heavy load; blocked practice suits the first, varied practice and feedback the second, and volume under load over months the third.

What actually helps you learn a lift faster?

Four things with motor learning evidence: practice structure, blocked repetition of the same drill in the cognitive stage and varied, mixed practice in the associative stage, which feels worse within a session and tests better across them; feedback from a camera or coach, given not after every rep so the lift does not come to depend on it; an external cue, push the floor away or drive the bar to the ceiling, which learns and performs better than an internal cue about the body; and sleep after practice, where a night improves motor sequence speed by around twenty per cent without a further rep and restriction removes the gain.

Does sleep really matter for learning technique?

It is the largest measured intervention on the motor side: a night of sleep after practising a motor sequence improves its speed by around a fifth the next day with no further practice, the consolidation that turns a session's reps into a stored skill, and restricting sleep that night removes the gain, so a lifter who drills a new lift and sleeps five hours has done the reps and lost the consolidation; the first question for a lift that is not sticking is what time the lifter went to bed after the sessions it was practised in.

Is there any supplement that helps you learn skills faster?

None with an authorised claim or a motor learning evidence base in healthy adults; caffeine at 75mg carries an authorised claim for alertness and attention, which can help the cognitive stage's concentration without touching consolidation, and creatine's cognitive trials are in the sleep-deprived and in vegetarians rather than in skill learning; the interventions with measured effects on learning a movement are practice structure, feedback, external cueing and the night of sleep after practice, and none comes in a capsule.

Sources

1. The motor skill acquisition literature (Fitts and Posner): skill learning passes through a cognitive stage of understanding the movement, an associative stage of refining it with feedback, and an autonomous stage where it runs without attention, with practice structure, feedback and sleep the variables shown to move the rate. PubMed record
2. The memory systems literature: working, episodic, semantic, procedural and prospective memory are distinct systems with different neural bases and different tests, so a single cognitive screening scale measures some and not others, and an intervention's effect on one system does not imply an effect on another. PubMed record
3. The sleep and motor skill consolidation literature: a night of sleep after practice improves motor sequence speed by around twenty per cent without further practice, and sleep restriction removes the gain, making sleep the measurable intervention for the motor side of the nervous system. PubMed record
4. Mori K, Inatomi S, Ouchi K, Azumi Y, Tuchida T. Improving effects of the mushroom Yamabushitake (Hericium erinaceus) on mild cognitive impairment: a double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial. Phytotherapy Research 2009;23(3):367-372. PubMed record

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