Oct 15, 2026 · 1 hr 8 min · 12 segments
Despite popular belief, the ability to continue to push yourself is trainable—it isn’t simply a matter of grit. We discuss the science of willpower, its mechanisms, and how you can better cultivate…
Grant HolickyHost
Chris CaseHost
But, so Scott, we've been talking about willpower back and forth through email a lot, but we wanted to get into the neuroscience of willpower.
I think one thing we should correct people on, uh, everybody's heard the term willpower, but what isn't willpower? I know that's a strange way of phrasing a question, but I think there's a bit of a myth about it, so correct us.
... that happens in your brain, and that process is affected by a lot of different factors, which we'll get into.
And what's important about it, I think, for endurance athletes is that willpower is directly influential in terms of how closely we can approach our true physiological limits, and it's trainable.
It's not something that is fixed at birth and either you have it or you don't, and we're gonna talk about some of the ways that athletes can hone in and develop that in an intentional way.
I think that's a really important note there, that it's not something you're born with, and I think that's something that we see all the time, right? Like Michael Jordan had this willpower that you just don't have.
That was every Nike commercial I ever watched as a kid, like you either have it or you don't.
And it is very trainable, which is a really interesting but useful piece of information here.
Not to distract us from the main point of this conversation, but I think most things like willpower and motivation and grit and all these things are all a product of neuroscience, neurophysiological processes.
It's the people that don't fully understand that, the influencers, not to put them down or anything, but they just say, "Oh, it's just mental toughness," because they don't have the scientific background to explain how that all works.
So I feel like this is a conversation we could have about a lot of concepts in sports psychology.
There are scientific underpinnings, physiological and biological processes that explain a lot of this stuff, if not all of this stuff, sometimes better than others.
Sometimes we know very little about how it happens, and so we're extrapolating perhaps.
But, so Scott, we've been talking about willpower back and forth through email a lot, but we wanted to get into the neuroscience of willpower.
I think one thing we should correct people on, uh, everybody's heard the term willpower, but what isn't willpower? I know that's a strange way of phrasing a question, but I think there's a bit of a myth about it, so correct us.
... that happens in your brain, and that process is affected by a lot of different factors, which we'll get into.
And what's important about it, I think, for endurance athletes is that willpower is directly influential in terms of how closely we can approach our true physiological limits, and it's trainable.
It's not something that is fixed at birth and either you have it or you don't, and we're gonna talk about some of the ways that athletes can hone in and develop that in an intentional way.
I think that's a really important note there, that it's not something you're born with, and I think that's something that we see all the time, right? Like Michael Jordan had this willpower that you just don't have.
That was every Nike commercial I ever watched as a kid, like you either have it or you don't.
And it is very trainable, which is a really interesting but useful piece of information here.
Not to distract us from the main point of this conversation, but I think most things like willpower and motivation and grit and all these things are all a product of neuroscience, neurophysiological processes.
It's the people that don't fully understand that, the influencers, not to put them down or anything, but they just say, "Oh, it's just mental toughness," because they don't have the scientific background to explain how that all works.
So I feel like this is a conversation we could have about a lot of concepts in sports psychology.
There are scientific underpinnings, physiological and biological processes that explain a lot of this stuff, if not all of this stuff, sometimes better than others.
Sometimes we know very little about how it happens, and so we're extrapolating perhaps.
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