Hot - Wire Your Workout

The start-up Halo Neuroscience says it can boost your workouts by unlocking your most powerful muscle of all: your mind. It’s called transcranial direct current stimulation — better known as “zapping your brain with electricity” and whatever you may think of it, one thing is clear: It has the potential to change fitness forever.

- Tom Foster

It’s just a couple of milliamps of positive electric current, roughly the same amount used to power your average household smoke alarm, flowing directly into my brain’s motor cortex. Suffice it to say: I’m a little uneasy about it. I’m sitting in a windowless lab, quietly gazing at stark white walls as my head continuously absorbs the tiny electric stabbings. No matter how hard I try, I can’t shake the image of a young Jack Nicholson thrashing his way through electroshock therapy in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But unlike his electric current, mine is actually deemed safe, and the man administering my treatment is no Nurse Ratched. His name is Aaron Wayne. A former captain of Stanford University’s swim team, Wayne works as a field research engineer for San Francisco–based start-up Halo Neuroscience. I’m testing out the company’s debut product, the Halo Sport: A set of earphones — lined with rubbery spikes — that, the company says, supercharges your brain for the sake of fitness.

I’m also exercising. With the headset firmly on, I’m seated at a specialised curl machine with a few electrodes attached to my arm to measure my power output. Every time I do a curl, a blue line on a computer screen across from me jags up to a peak when I lift and drops off when I finish.