NeurOptimal Sports Performance
®
Train your brain like you train your body
Whether you are an athlete looking for a competitive edge or a fitness fanatic, you know the importance of maximizing your health. You spend hours in the gym training your body, but how many hours do you spend training your brain? The better a person's brain functions, the better the person functions overall! Thirty-three-minute neurofeedback sessions are like mini workouts for your noggin. And just like physical exercise, a consistent neurofeedback regimen has all kinds of benefits. Let’s face it, performing at your peak comes with high demands. When you are in a prolonged state of stress due to the high demands of performing at an optimal level, your brain function is impacted. These physical, mental, and emotional impacts often steal your ability to succeed. The longer the impact, the greater the imbalance, which leads to decreased function and performance. This may cause result in:
Fitness plateau
Muscle fatigue
Lack of focus
Forgetting key tasks
Mind racing a mile a minute
Concussions and brain trauma
How do irregular brain wave patterns affect athletic performance?
Our brains produce brain waves that control our behaviours and emotions. Due to our environment and the ongoing stressors impacting the body every second of every day, the body can become overloaded, and our brainwaves can become abnormal. The longer the impact, the greater the imbalance, which leads to decreased function and performance.
Our brain produces brainwaves that communicate with one another at rapid speeds. However, if the timing of this communication is off even slightly, the ability to function at a maximum level can be impaired.
This creates abnormalities in attention, movement control and the ability to heal because our brainwaves cannot make the proper connections.
How does Neurofeedback work?
Quite simply, Neurofeedback is a passive training method to teach the brain to function in a more balanced and healthy way by providing the perfect learning conditions. Neurofeedback builds “muscle” and “burns fat”. In other words, EEG biofeedback AKA neurofeedback trains your central nervous system to marshal its resources more efficiently and that results in several significant life improvements.
What are the results of Neurofeedback for athletes, sports performance and gym fanatics?
Improvements from neurofeedback that have been clinically observed include:
Increase performance in “The Zone”
Maintain mental focus when fatigued
Enhance skills and performance
Execute faster and better
Bettering accuracy
Greater relaxation to improve muscle healing
Improve physical fitness and strength
Ability to focus through physical pain
Mastering new tasks and material more quickly
Reducing discipline problems
Who uses Neurofeedback?
A number of professional athletes and Olympians are using neurofeedback to increase their performance on the field. So why not up your game?
How exactly does neurofeedback affect a person's ability to play sports?
Attention and Focus
Sports performance places heavy demands on the brain to focus while simultaneously ignoring distracting stimuli. While different sports place different demands on the brain overall, neurofeedback improves a person's ability to stay on task while maintaining a high level of brain function. Yoga for example encourages mental discipline through sustained concentration. Have you ever tried to stay upright in Tree Pose while your mind is drifting and wandering? Good luck with that! Similarly, neurofeedback helps to improve consistent focus and concentration.Basically, neurofeedback teaches your brain to pay attention.
Improves Emotional Control
Arguably one of the most difficult aspects of being an athlete is the ability to perform without being influenced by emotional triggers. Anxiety over a big upcoming game or the pressure to perform to high standards can negatively influence how an athlete performs. Neurofeedback stabilises mood and emotional perception, including the perception and ability to cope with stress. This decreases anxiety overall, making moments of high demand easier to emotionally manage. Neurofeedback helps decrease distractibility caused by these emotions so an athlete can performoptimally.
Slows Cognitive Decline
As a person ages, the brain naturally begins to decline in certain areas, such as memory. Just as a person must exercise the body to keep in prime physical shape, fitness for the brain is also necessary to keep the brain functioning at its best. Neurofeedback acts as this exercise for the brain to maintain its highest ability. As an athlete ages, performance quality does not weaken as it naturally would, as the brainstays in peak condition.
Improves Sleep
A person's sleep directly influences how a person performs any task during the day, whether it be intellectual or physical performance. Athlete's need recuperative, restorative sleep to maintain brain health. Sleep also assists in the healing process,
helping to keep the athlete in the best physical health possible. Neurofeedback has been proven to improve the quality and depth of sleep, which directly benefits an athlete's performance.
Restores Brain Function After Traumatic Brain Injury
Athletes suffer from traumatic brain injury due to the nature of sports. Brain injury can occur in one single incident or in less severe yet repetitive incidences, such as when a football player hits the ball with their head repeatedly after years of playing. Due to brain injury, difficulties arise in areas such as attention, emotional control, balance control, impulse control, anxiety, depression, insomnia, and even seizures. Neuroplasticity is the brain's natural ability to reorganize itself by creating new neural networks and correcting already existing connections. Thanks to neuroplasticity, neurofeedback is able to teach the brain to function normally once again, even if it has been many years since the initial injury.
Resilience
Just like exercise builds endurance, Neurofeedback can help your mind “bounce back” from day-to-day challenges and stressors. When you are emotionally overwhelmed, eventually the brain becomes consumed with past and future events and doesn’t function at its best. Neurofeedback can help your brain “roll with the punches” of daily life.
Flexibility
Stress, inactivity and natural aging can make you physically stiff and inflexible. If you don’t consistently exercise, your body is forced to work harder to accomplish even basic daily physical tasks. Similarly, neurofeedback works your brain’s “muscles” and makes it so that daily tasks consume less mental effort. Instead of staying stuck on problem, brain training helps your brain “bend” and “reach” for better solutions.
Core strength
Traditional weightlifting/training tends to isolate certain muscle groups for improved strength. The problem with this approach is that some areas of your body don’t benefit as much as others: you can build strong legs and still have weak arms. Neurofeedback training, especially the Dynamical Neurofeedback ® like NeurOptimal ® , doesn’t spotlight any area of the brain. Their system is truly a “whole brain” approach that encourages drawing mental resources from wherever your central nervous system deems best for your individual brain. It benefits your whole body; this type of neurofeedback is adept at addressing many different issues and problems and therefore is best described as building “core strength” within your brain.