The 'cognitive middle gear' describes a state where high effort yields minimally useful benefit, often seen in athletes training intensely at threshold daily without optimal physiological adaptations.

“he calls this the cognitive middle gear and it's this this point where effort is high but uh sort of the end product is minimally useful um and if you think about uh athletes who may go out and thrash themselves at threshold for like an hour and do that every day it's very hard right and then it feels really hard but in terms of physiological adaptations that improve performance there's a big gap between how hard it is and benefits”