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Enhanced Sports Performance

There has been a tremendous amount of research demonstrating that thought content affects physiology (Suinn, 1993; Mahoney & Meyers, 1990), as well as the athletes’ focus of concentration. Angry thoughts and images, like thoughts and images associated with worry and anxiety, affect heart rate, muscle tension, and respiration rate. The changes in muscle tension levels and respiration rate can have a direct and very negative effect on the athlete’s fine motor coordination and timing.

Even emotionally neutral thoughts lead to physiological changes that interfere with performance and the athlete's ability to make smooth transitions.

The relationship between focus of concentration and emotional arousal is a reciprocal one (Mahoney & Meyers, 1990). This means that by teaching and/or helping athletes attend to neutral, task relevant cues, you can slow breathing and reduce muscle tension, allowing them to get back in the flow of the game. There is a wonderful article, Getting into the Optimal Performance State, written by Robert Nideffer, PhD that is well worth the read. You will find the article at: https://nideffer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Optimal-Performance.pdf

Distraction, anger, overload or anxiety can thwart all efforts at physical performance. When confidence is low and/or when the athlete loses control over emotions, however, it becomes impossible to get into the zone because transitions are interfered with.

Sports performance can be enhanced through techniques for improving visual concentration. And some problems with athletic ability may be linked to depth perception.

Visual skills are important to sports performance. For example, depth perception is the ability to quickly and accurately judge the distance and speed of objects; peripheral vision affords the ability to see objects in the periphery while concentrating on a fixed point; visual concentration is defined as the ability to stay focused on a visual task for increased awareness and fewer distractions.

How Color Therapy Can Help

At Brain Breakthrough we make use of an instrument called the Visual Field Charter. This tool is used to measure the visual field using different colors to determine the brain’s ability to process sensory and perceptual information. The Field of Vision is the ability of a person’s eye and brain to perceive things peripherally while looking straight ahead. While peripheral vision is defined as a more global ability of the brain to accept light in a less detailed way, the field of vision indicates the more specific amount of light that the eye can admit and the brain can translate into visual information or perceptions.

The way to measure the extent of a person’s visual field is to determine, while the subject is focused on a central point, at what range outside that point the individual begins to detect color, specifically white, blue, red or green. The measurement of this range of color recognition can be enormously helpful in determining the overall function of the brain and thereby the subject’s mental, emotional and physical well being. Just as a basal thermometer gages the body temperature, which information can be translated into a determining factor of a person’s physical condition, the visual field measurements can be used as an indicator of emotional and physical stress.

Research indicates that the size of our visual field can change relative to emotional states; history or presence of emotional trauma; and history or presence of physical trauma.
Once we determine the light perception deficit we determine the proper frequency the client will utilize for one or more 20 session series. This approach has been found to be very successful in enhancing reading and writing skills, focus, attention and concentration. We will often suggest other adjunctive approaches to expand the field of vision. If there are emotional or physical components in addition to the visual deficit, we utilize our other modalities to address them.

With Light Stimulation Therapy, we at Brain Breakthrough use color frequencies to expand the visual field of awareness improving depth perception, peripheral vision and visual concentration.