Welcome to the Get Fit Guys' quick and dirty tips to slim down and shape up.

My name is Ben Greenfield. I'm the Get Fit Guy. And in today's episode, we're going to talk about whether you should dope to get fit.

Now, my attention and curiosity was actually peaked about this topic by a recent article

written by famed exercise science researcher Samuel Marcorah. He wrote an article called

Can Doping Be a Good Thing, Using psychoactive drugs to facilitate physical activity behavior?

And in the article, he explored whether adherence to an exercise

program or motivation to exercise or even the intensity at which you exercise could be facilitated

via the use of psychoactive drugs. Yes, you heard right. Psychoactive drugs. In other words,

could the use of popular smart drugs like modafinil or heavy dosing with compounds like

caffeine make you more likely to stick to an exercise program or develop a healthy exercise

habit? Well, as ironic as it may seem, Dr. Markora does have some interesting thoughts on this,

and so do I. Before we delve into this latest research from Dr. Markora, you should know about

some previous research that sheds interesting light on this same research from Dr. Marcorah, you should know about some previous research

that sheds interesting light on this same topic. In this research from a couple years ago,

which I first reported on over at Ben Greenfield Fitness.com, Brazilian sports scientists used a non-invasive

form of brain stimulation called transcranial direct current stimulation,

or TDCS, to apply a tiny electrical current to the cortex in the brain.

Now, this cortex is the primary culprit when it comes to exercise fatigue.

The idea was that this stimulation would briefly interrupt the way neurons and the cortex communicate with each other and distract the brain from shutting down the body.

Of course, there was also a control group of cyclists that had the electrodes attached but didn't get any stimulation.

So what were the results of this brain tweaking?

Well, after 20 minutes of real or fake brain stimulation, the cyclist completed an all-out ride to exhaustion.

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