November 2008

Biofeedback helps shooter win Olympic Gold Medal

Sports psychologist Timothy Harkness rarely discusses results with his clients, but he couldn't help bringing up the subject of a possible Gold Medal after he finished a training session with Indian sharpshooter Abhinav Bindra.

"We had just completed an advanced respiration session ... that demonstrated such a close link between control of heart-rate and shooting outcome, that I finally began to feel that we had cracked the code of shooting success, and a gold medal was a possibility," he explained.

Dr. Harkness began working with Bindra in February 2008 -- just months before the opening of the Olympics in Beijing. Knowing time was short, he put together a training team that eventually included a chiropractor, medical doctor, physiotherapist, dietician and two shooting coaches.

A key tool for the training team was the NeuroInfiniti instrumentation by Thought Technology to monitor Bindra's physiological responses and provide immediate readings that could be closely monitored. This device is now available to all doctors of chiropractic for use in their own offices.

Harkness chose the Thought Technology device after realizing that the older type instrumentation, which relied solely on EMG and skin conductance, was not precise enough for a sport as subtle as shooting. What was needed was a tool that could combine EEG and heart rate variable (HRV) monitoring as well as other vital readings.

"Shooters hold their breath during triggering, and need to learn how to have a controlled parasympathetic response just before triggering, even though they may feel short of air," Harkness noted. "The balance was to find a state that had him muscularly relaxed, but still allowed him the sharpness of reaction to trigger at the right moment."

The training session with Bindra was a learning experience for Harkness as well.

"While I am an experienced sports psychologist, I am relatively new to biofeedback. It is a strange experience sending a biofeedback trained athlete into a competition, because there's much less to do at the competition venue. You don't need the inspirational little comments, or the relaxing jokes, because the athlete has the tools to do the job, and you can pretty much leave him to get on with it."

In a letter to Lawrence Klein, Thought Technology's co-founder and vice president, Harkness shared credit for achieving the Gold.

"I guess that makes it a gold medal for Thought Technology," he wrote. "We used a range of forms of biofeedback, including EMG, skin conductivity, peripheral temperature, respiration rate and amplitude, BVP, EKG, HRV and neurofeedback. We feel that this level of interaction allows us to claim it as a Gold for biofeedback."

Despite its increased use in medical and health care settings, there is still a great deal of confusion about biofeedback. As Alan Glaros, PhD, president of the Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback (AAPB) admitted early this year, "The nomenclature task force has been hard at work crafting a definition of biofeedback that is comprehensive and consumer-friendly. This is harder work than you might imagine."

For now, the AAPB defines biofeedback as "a process that enables an individual to learn how to change physiological activity for the purposes of improving health and performance. Precise instruments measure physiological activity such as brainwaves, heart function, breathing, muscle activity, and skin temperature. These instruments rapidly and accurately "feed back" information to the user. The presentation of this information -- often in conjunction with changes in thinking, emotions, and behavior -- supports desired physiological changes. Over time, these changes can endure without continued use of an instrument."

Obviously, today's neurophysiological measurement instruments go far beyond what was once thought of as "biofeedback." In fact, the updated NeuroInfiniti includes EEG, Para-spinal SEMG, Dynamic SEMG, specific SEMG, Hand Temperature, Skin Conductance (GSR), EKG, Respiration belt and Heart Rate Variability sensors, making it the ideal, state-of-the-art instrument for chiropractic offices.

Because of its broad capabilities and applications for chiropractic, NeuroInfiniti has won the endorsement of the World Chiropractic Alliance (WCA).

"NeuroInfiniti is the only chiropractic instrumentation in our profession that performs accurate reproducible results and is capable of measuring how stress affects an individual," explained WCA President Terry A. Rondberg, DC. "This equipment literally does stress response evaluations as well as biofeedback and neurofeedback. Chiropractic will become the world's leader in measuring how healthy a nervous system is and will finally be able to demonstrate how a chiropractic adjustment to correct subluxations impacts human health."

For more information on neurophysiological measurement instrumentation, visit neuroinfiniti.com or call DeDe Van Riper at 877-233-0022.