Not to brag, but it may have been one of my best games ever. I felt quick. Agile. Balanced. Tuned in. Calm. Focused.
Ultimate Frisbee requires all these things. You’re on the run most of the game — and usually sprinting; it’s a good way to get in a quick 15,000 steps. You must swerve, dodge, outsmart, and (hopefully) outrun the defender.
And to catch the disc requires not only eye-hand coordination but also an ability to read its flight, often while running downfield looking over one shoulder and then the other. That flight can be a vexing parabola that rises and drops and dances and is further affected by any breath of a breeze.
Focus is indeed key — and I believe I had an advantage: neurological optimization. I had recently gone through several sessions of advanced neuro workouts with Jeremy Schmoe, DC, DACNB, founder and director of the Functional Neurology Clinic in Minnetonka, Minn.
Schmoe has focused on helping folks recover from head injuries — people who slip and fall on an icy winter day, young equestrians who topple off their horses, and NHL and NFL players who have been hit in the head once too often as part of their day job. (For more on concussion recovery, see “The New Science of Concussions” or listen to the Life Time Talks podcast “Protecting Our Brains: TBIs, Concussions, and Everyday Healing.”)
Because Schmoe works with athletes, the question arose: Is it possible to enhance your brain — and thus your balance, coordination, focus, and more — for pure athletic performance?
“It’s all about full-body sensory-motor integration,” he explains.
Neuro Training
Neuro optimization is the next frontier of sports performance. Myriad recent studies gauge the future of optimizing neural efficiency for sports, and a 2020 perspective piece in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience concludes that “neuromodulation [such as using transcranial direct current stimulation, or tDCS] might be an alternative way to optimize training outcomes by a selective modulation of performance-relevant brain regions.”
The authors prophesize that “neurodiagnostics [such as brain-imaging techniques] might help to identify youth athletes with elite potential.”
The science is still new and developing, and Schmoe’s clinic is not alone in helping athletes seek out that brainpower edge: Scientists and medical-tech entrepreneurs alike are in the arena.
Several companies offer digital media designed to spur neuro performance. Among them is NeuroTracker’s 3-D video game, which projects bouncing yellow spheres on a screen for you to track. The company claims that brief six-minute sessions result in a 52 percent increase in perception speed as well as “enhanced situational awareness” and “boosted decision-making.” Clients include U.S. Navy SEALs, Olympians, and the Premier League’s Manchester United, among other pro teams.
A technology called NeuroTrainer uses virtual-reality games to hone your focus and coordination. It too is used by a variety of pro teams.
Schmoe and other functional neurologists trained in neuro optimization look at the larger picture. The first step is to assess whether athletes have past disturbances that may affect perception.
Concussions — whether a single traumatic brain injury (TBI) or the cumulative effect of multiple concussive or subconcussive head injuries, which can cause chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE — may alter the brain’s structure and function.
Yet, contrary to common wisdom, you don’t actually have to hit your head to be concussed: A TBI can result from a severe shake that sends the brain crashing into the skull (known as a coup injury); sometimes, the brain may even twist atop its stem as well. Studies, including a report following 43 junior-hockey players published in the Oxford University neurology journal Brain, have shown that concussions can cause significant cognitive processing delays and impairment.
Understanding Baseline Neuro Health
Schmoe’s protocol begins with both low- and high-tech baseline tests. “What we do is a little bit different than traditional physical training programs,” he explains. “We’re really looking into the underlying neurology of an athlete, looking at their gait, their balance, their reaction times, their stability, their balance, the stability of their eyes.”
Schmoe uses videonystagmography, or VNG, to record fine eye movements. He assesses the client’s ability to track moving targets. Then, he checks to see if their eyes can accurately make “saccade” movements, spotting quickly appearing objects in their peripheral vision field.
“We check to see if everything is lining up and integrating together to let you know where your body is in space,” says Schmoe. “You need to know where you are to be able to predict and have appropriate motor planning and programming.”
Examining an athlete, he regularly finds small or large disturbances in this perception that are the likely results of minor, major, or cumulative jolts to the head. “A lot of times, athletes have had brain incidences, but they’re still performing at high levels,” he says.
Their brain or body, or often specifically their neck muscles (more on this later), may be compensating to help them. And those who have had one concussion are much more likely to have another — and second concussions can have more serious long-term impacts.
If an athlete hasn’t suffered past concussions, Schmoe says, neuro optimization can still help take them to another level. “There are always things that are off with people: People’s maps of their body are consistently changing as they’re growing. Food affects the gut and causes inflammation. Stress from training or overtraining. Viruses. All these things can affect the nervous system.” (For more on how these issues can cause dizziness or vertigo, see “How to Treat Dizziness and Vertigo.”)
Brain Recalibration
After the initial assessment, Schmoe uses a variety of high-tech therapies to help recalibrate your brain’s visual and vestibular systems. When you first enter his clinic, you might think you’ve mistakenly walked into a futuristic amusement park — and a highly sophisticated one at that.
A machine called a GyroStim looks like a NASA spacecraft simulator counting down to blastoff: Strapped into its chair, you’re moved through planes of motion — sometimes via back or front flips — to stimulate the brain’s perception of position and place for vestibular therapy.
A virtual-reality headset called a Virtualis is combined with a moveable posturography platform to challenge your balance — and can quickly induce intense motion sickness. A grand, mandala-like light board called the Dynavision D2 helps patients strengthen their saccadic reaction.
Other technologies, such as pulsed electromagnetic frequency (PEMF), are designed to improve blood flow and stimulate and “exercise” the body’s cells. “Think of it as recharging your battery,” says Schmoe. “We’ve noted in our clinic that after we do PEMF on the head that it increases the speed of patients’ fast-eye movements, speeding up reaction times and saccades.”
In addition, he often focuses therapy on neck muscles. To compensate for off-kilter perception by our brain, our necks (and sometimes our spines) may tense and tilt to rebalance our senses, becoming less agile in the process. Schmoe uses both chiropractic techniques and an ARPwave that stimulates neck muscles with electricity.
He works with numerous NFL and NHL players, several supercrossers, and assorted gymnasts and mountain bikers, among others. “We have some hockey players that come in to do PEMF and the Virtualis and GyroStim before they play, and they note that they feel quicker on the ice; their legs feel more turned on,” he says.
Schmoe describes neuro optimization as a counterpart to physical training — the active exercises that stretch or build muscle. “A lot of what we do is more reflexive in nature: Think of it as doing things that help get you in the zone.”
NHL left wing Brock Nelson, alternate captain of the New York Islanders, works with Schmoe. “I’ve found that neuro optimization has helped me in many ways for performance,” he says. “Mentally, I feel clearer; physically, I feel stronger and more balanced. I noticed better energy levels after my first few sessions.”
Nelson also uses several phone apps for regular neuro workouts, including NeuroTrackerX. “It helps me work on my eyes and feel locked in,” he explains. And first thing each summer, he gets a “tune-up” and then visits the clinic several more times during the off-season. (Hear from NHL pro Vinni Lettieri about his experience working with Schmoe in this Life Time Talks podcast episode.)
Neuro optimization may not just boost your stick handling, fine-tune your running coordination, or elevate your jump to catch a Frisbee. Schmoe says it can also help you ward off injury.
“The vestibular system fires the head and neck and eyes, so everything lines up appropriately. But it also fires down to your body to stabilize your spine, your pelvis, and your legs to prevent falls. When you’re running at full speed, how you’re placing your leg is integrated with the performance of your vestibular system,” he explains.
“So if your vestibular system is giving you bad information and then you go to step, that could change the way that it reflexively fires down to your legs and put you at a higher risk of injuring your ACL or MCL or having a hamstring tear. There’s research from the NCAA that with concussion you have an increased incidence of injuring your knee [or other lower-extremity musculoskeletal injury] if you don’t rehabilitate the whole sensory-motor-integration loops appropriately.”
“There’s research from the NCAA that with concussion you have an increased incidence of injuring your knee [or other lower-extremity musculoskeletal injury] if you don’t rehabilitate the whole sensory-motor-integration loops appropriately.”
A study published in the journal Sports Health found that “the majority of patients with concussions (80 to 90 percent) recover within a relatively short time frame (seven to 10 days) when utilizing standard recommended clinical assessments, and this is considered a transient injury.” However, the authors write, impaired posture control, cognition, and neural-activation patterns were measured in some cases for months or years after injury despite the apparent initial recovery.
The risks were detailed in a Journal of Sport and Health Science review published in 2021: “If sensory information is not accurately perceived or there is interference with sensory-information processing and cognition, motor function will be altered, and an athlete may become vulnerable to injury during sport participation,” the authors wrote. “In conjunction, altered motor function is demonstrated after [a sport-related concussion] in muscle activation and force production, movement patterns, balance/postural stability, and motor-task performance, especially performance of a motor task paired with a cognitive task.”
Mountain biker Anneke Beerten of the Netherlands won three world championships before a 2020 car accident. Beerten suffered a TBI and whiplash: The ensuing dizziness, vertigo, headaches, nausea, insomnia, neck pain, brain fog, and memory lapses conspired to force her to retire from racing in 2021.
Three years on, Beerten’s postconcussive symptoms lingered. In 2023, she traveled to Schmoe’s clinic for a five-day intensive session and finally began seeing significant improvements.
“It takes a lot of work to recover from something like this,” Beerten explains in a YouTube video she made to publicize the importance — and difficulty — of TBI recovery. “Things are starting to fire up now: My head is becoming a little clearer, my eyes are starting to move faster, and we’re kind of like calibrating my whole system again.”
Beerten’s now back on a bike, coaching other riders, and says she is “just hoping to keep making improvements on my brain injury in the future.”
Mind Game
During my initial assessment, Schmoe first graphed my eye movements with VNG. He noted that my pursuit eye movements jerked and wavered and were slow on the left side following vertical targets. My eyes drifted a bit, too; they didn’t stay locked on a target.
My overall balance was good, but my eye-hand coordination on the left side lagged. “What that tells us is that most likely something happened previously to you that changed your neurological circuitry, probably affecting your vestibular system,” Schmoe explained.
Indeed, I had had my share of head jolts, including a backflip off a runaway horse and a car-bus-bicycle smackdown that a cyclist (me) was never going to win. And so I went through six weeks of once-a-week neuro-optimization therapy.
After the first session, I felt a lovely sense of calm: Schmoe says this is common as your nervous system recalibrates and relaxes from being stuck in fight-or-flight mode. (A return of the Moro reflex, or startle reflex, is a frequent concussion aftereffect that indicates dysregulation of the sympathetic nervous system, and Schmoe determined mine had been reactivated.)
Week after week, my test scores improved. And I was also doing neuro optimization exercises on my own with a neurobics workout Schmoe created (which you can find at “The Neurobic Workout”)
At my final assessment, Schmoe said my balance had solidified and my gait was smoother. My saccades scores were higher. And my pursuit eye movements had both steadied and focused better: My eyes had only been tracking left-side targets 20 percent of the time; they were now at 55 percent.
The real test, though, would come on the Ultimate Frisbee playing field.
I’m no pro: These are just weekend pickup games (albeit prep for league play), so they don’t really matter. But, of course, they do. And while it’s all about camaraderie and the spirit of the game, it’s also about playing your best.
From the get-go, I felt more relaxed and confident, my running smoother and more natural, and my spatial awareness of the field and fellow players seemed keener. And I felt zeroed in on that disc like never before.
Which made the game that much more fun.
This Post Has 0 Comments