Setting a focus for the Personal Trainer

For most people, we recommend training with the Personal Trainer without making any changes to it. The Personal Trainer is specifically designed to meet the training goals of most adults who want to improve their cognitive abilities. By default the Personal Trainer includes all BrainHQ exercises when creating a schedule. If you stay with the default focus you will eventually work your way through 29 BrainHQ exercises over time. But, if there’s a specific cognitive function you’d like to work on, changing the settings to focus on a specific area is an easy way to do that.

In this article we'll cover:

• How to find focuses on the website
• How to find focuses in the app
• Standard Focuses
• Specialized Focuses

For information about the Custom Focus feature, please refer to this article instead.

How to find focuses on the website

1. Log in to BrainHQ at www.brainhq.com 
2. Click your name at the top right corner of the page
3. Click "Profile" in the menu that appears
   
4. Scroll down to the section titled "Trainer Settings"
5. Click on the link with the name of the focus to change your focus.
   
   (Note: You can also reach this menu by clicking the "FOCUS" button in the top left corner of your Personal Trainer's exercise schedule.)
   
   

On the following page you will have a list of many different focuses to choose from, broken into three categories: Standard Focuses, Specialized Focuses, and Custom Focus.

How to find focuses in the app

1. Open the BrainHQ app and log in if you aren't already
   
   
2. Click the menu icon in the top corner ()
3. Tap on the "FOCUS" option
   

On the following page you will have a list of many different focuses to choose from, broken into three categories: Standard Focuses, Specialized Focuses, and Custom Focus.

Standard Focuses

There are two Standard Focuses - the default Personal Trainer, and the default Trainer with the Daily Spark. 

The Personal Trainer focus is the default setting that includes all 29 exercises in BrainHQ. The Personal Trainer with Daily Spark focus is your default Personal Trainer, but it will automatically queue up the Daily Spark exercise first when creating your schedule.

Specialized Focuses

Specialized Focuses are groupings of exercises that our team of scientists have put together to help train specific skills.

If you click on one of the Specialized Focuses, this will bring up an informational page that explains the purpose of the focus, what exercises are included in this focus, and how the exercises were selected for this focus. For example, these are the exercises that are included in the Auditory Intensive focus:

When you’re ready to start training, click the > button at the top of the page.

You’ll be taken back to your Personal Trainer page, but you should see that the exercises have been replaced with the exercises from the focus you selected (in this case, the Auditory Intensive focus).

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For further information, please refer to our series of articles about the Personal Trainer:

• Introduction to the Personal Trainer
• Where to find the Personal Trainer
• How the Personal Trainer picks exercises
• How to advance through the Personal Trainer
• Saving a Custom Focus for the Personal Trainer