Neurofeedback for Athletes
Learn to Relax and Stay Focused for Competition Using Neurofeedback
Neurofeedback can assist athletes in achieving peak performance brain states. By learning to control one's own brainwaves, athletes can mimic the brain patterns used during optimum performance. The more relaxed an athlete remains, the better he or she can concentrate to execute an action. Unnecessary anxiety can inhibit the brain's ability to carry out actions required for a task. Athletes can learn to retrain their brains with Neurofeedback to limit the anxiety associated with competition.
Enhance Your Physical Balance with Neurofeedback
Additionally, Neurofeedback has been demonstrated to enhance an athlete's physical balance. By improving the brain's functioning in areas that control hand-eye coordination and the brain's awareness of the body in space, athletes can implement more fluid and precise movements helping them to experience true physical peak performance as well.
Reaction time can be adversely affected if attention is inhibited.
Neurofeedback Reduces Muscle Weakness
Muscle weakness is either perceived or true. It is the difference between chronic fatigue syndrome (CSI) and Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS). In CSI, there is a delayed recovery time due to the way the neurons are signaling your muscles.
Central muscle fatigue, one type of CSI, is caused by a reduction in the neural drive or the nerve based motor command to working muscles. This results in a decline of your ability to output force. It means your muscles have the capacity to do the work, but the neurons are not communicating effectively through specific pathways. Resting the voluntarily fatigued muscles reduces central muscle fatigue.
Neural muscle fatigue, another type of CSI, most commonly occurs after weeks of rapid gains in strength have been accomplished. The nerve’s ability to generate sustained, high-frequency signals allows muscles to contract with the greatest force. The muscle basically stops listening because it has reached its physiological limit and the nerve has reached its maximum level of output signals.
Peripheral muscle fatigue comes after neural muscle fatigue. The body cannot supply the metabolites or energy required to meet the demands of the muscles. This results in the burning feeling in local muscle groups. The problem is not with a build-up of lactic acid, but rather the calcium receptors on the muscles. This is actually a neurological fatigue caused by metabolic problems. The neurons can no longer fire efficiently. There is a link between contractile and sensory muscular processes. People who suffer from muscle weakness require multiple sensory inputs. The brain requires more information about the task in order to complete the task. Visual, auditory, and tactile stimulation can help to develop muscle strength by tricking the brain into holding a contraction. The addition of sensory information increases the brain’s output to reinforce the muscle for continuation of performance in order to process the sensory information.
All muscle actions are initiated by electrical signals from the brain. Remember: the brain decides which neurons to activate depending on how often they have been activated before and how many connections they have. Repetitive exercises, both mental and physical, will reinforce the brain’s decision to allocate resources to the neurons being used for a task. This is how neurofeedback accomplishes increases in reaction time, hand-eye coordination, and regulation of neurotransmitters. Practice makes perfect.
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