Athletes

Whether amateur or professional, developing specific skills affect every aspect of life. Athletes also make great employees due to the skills they learn to become competitive.

Our Program and tailored training benefits athletes in every sport. There is also significant performance enhancement in all areas of business and industry as well as academics at any age. Research shows significant benefits across a wide range of populations.

Our training has been shown to improve fundamental cognitive abilities with rapid results, even for very low-functioning individuals. 

Visual acuity is only the beginning of athletic excellence. In sports, almost 80% of perceptual input is visual.

But even 20/20 vision does not mean athletes are performing at their peak. Just because they can see clearly doesn’t mean they can ascertain where.

  • Objects are in space, how fast it’s traveling or if it’s changing direction.
  • Opportunities to strengthen performance-related aspects of vision.
  • Objectively evaluate vision skills
  • Measure and analyze eye movement, brain processing, and reaction time.
  • Compare vision to peers, amateurs and pro athletes.
  • Provide computer-based vision exercises for players to do at home.
  • Measure improvements as training progresses.
  • Strengthen vision as it relates to athletic performance.
  • Raise Athletic Performance to the Next Level

Our program begins with our Better Brain Better Game Evaluation:

Skills it measures. It measures many cognitive and psychological components to indicate strengths and opportunities. It is a valuable tool that we use to provide customized programs for all our clients. Some areas identified and trained are:

  • Eye-Hand Coordination – Works on gross motor movement and accurate response.
  • Go / No-Go – This requires quick decision making and swift movement.
  • Dynamic Vision – This trains peripheral vision awareness and rapid eye movement.
  • Perception Training – Symbols appear briefly, requiring a person to quickly take in information in both central and peripheral vision. This can help the brain’s data collection and memory.
  • Response Inhibition – This trains rapid decision-making and muscle response.
  • Spatial Memory – This helps train spatial memory skills.
  • Spatial Sequence – A variation of spatial memory.
  • Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) – The MOT skill in life often helps avoid collisions. Move a dot to avoid collisions with multiple objects that are moving around the screen.
  • Depth Perception – Challenges and trains judging depth at distance, either under time pressure or with unlimited time. Judging depth is fundamental for perceiving the world.
  • Near Far Shift – Trains the eye muscles to rapidly shift focus and recognize details. Quick near far shift capability is important in all areas of life, from sports to driving to walking through a store.
  • Visual Search – Quickly find and touch the single target amongst the distractors. Search and find tasks are critical for success in most sports and real-world activities.
  • Tempo – Maintain rhythm by touching the target with each beat. This module is useful for training audio/visual correlation and anticipation timing.
  • ‍Shape Cancellation – This module helps assess for visual neglect issues. 
  • ‍Visual Motor Integration – This training works on neuromotor skills and visual guided motion.

Neurotracker is a software-based dynamic vision and cognitive training tool.

Research with NeuroTracker shows significant benefits across a wide range of populations. NeuroTracker training has been shown to improve fundamental cognitive abilities with rapid results, even for very low-functioning individuals. As NeuroTracker robustly improves attention, executive function, working memory, processing speed, and other central brain functions, clinicians use NeuroTracker as core part of interventions to improve:

  • Concentration
  • Focus
  • Awareness
  • Sustained attention
  • Selective attention
  • Distributed attention
  • Dynamic attention
  • Vision
  • Response control
  • Processing speed

Our Dynamic Vision training can be done at our facility or remotely through on-line digital technology allowing the individual or groups to access any time or place. Many athletes use this training will on the road competing so they are always accelerating their skills in the following sports:

  • Baseball/softball
  • Football
  • Hockey
  • Fencing
  • Field hockey
  • Rugby
  • Cricket
  • Racing (all motorsports)
  • Tennis
  • Table tennis
  • Gymnastics
  • E-games
  • Skiing
  • Waterskiing
  • Boxing
  • MMA
  • Extreme Sports
  • Just to name a few……

Our Neurofeeback brain training is extremely beneficial to train the brain to be calm in all situations and be able to access the “Zone” or “Flow” easier.

Enhanced Situational Awareness

Situational Awareness plays a big part in everything we do, but can provide many benefits in the sports world. Being aware of everything around us generally helps keep us from being injured and minimizing accidents. It also allows us to anticipate better and react faster.  

Improved Processing Skills

Good Processing skills are imperative for successful understanding and ability to work through problems and perform job requirements. Brain training helps open up the neural pathways enabling the brain to process information more effectively.

Improved Focus and Concentration

With the many different things constantly bombarding us, the task of being able to focus and concentrate becomes more difficult. Brain Training and DVT help an athlete to screen out unnecessary noise and distraction and focus on the game.

Improved Self Confidence

When all our cognitive functions are performing at their peak, we exhibit more self confidence, energy and the ability to take on new projects and interests. Brain training helps to create a more self-confident and relaxed demeanor.

Relaxed State of Mind and Stabilized Moods

Stress effects appear in every aspect of our lives. Being able to manage these situations more effectively helps us to react and resolve in a more effective way while minimizing the negative symptoms that stress has on our mental and physical being.

Improved Physical Performance

Having a fit brain results in the opportunity to improve physical performance. Many of our athletes strive for the elite level in their sport and find it with our techniques and technologies. Even our weekend warriors find an improvement in their participation whether its hockey, golf or track days.

Enhances Learning, Scholastic Performance and Verbal Learning Skills

Scientific reports show that a demonstrated increase in social interactions may be seen in children with autism and ADHD following neurofeedback training. Many other symptoms associated with these and other LD’s see improvement not only by their parents, but teachers and support staff. Adults both diagnosed and undiagnosed see noticeable changes in the workplace and other situations resulting in a calmer demeanor. 

Improves Dynamic Vision

Now, through a sophisticated program of electronic perception/reaction exercises, the Dynamic vision program at Optimum Edge has been shown to produce dramatic results in: eye-hand coordination, peripheral awareness, concentration under stress conditions, speed and span of recognition, depth perception and anticipation timing.

Athletes who have trained with our program report significant improvements in their ability to react, with greater speed and confidence, to events happening in their periphery, without having to move their eyes from a key central target. They read plays faster, concentrate better and longer, judge the speed and distance of moving objects with greater accuracy, and adjust their focus more quickly to objects moving toward or away from them

Overall surroundings become clearer and improved awareness minimizes accidents and improves our performance.

Improved Reaction Time and Decision Making Skills

Athletes in competitive sports love the results they get from Dynamic Vision training and Brain training. Their reaction time and quick thinking after unanticipated events on the field is noticeably improved. We may think this is the only area this skill applies, but is a major bonus with executives and in the workplace where decision making and reactions are required daily.

Minimizes Stress Effects

Stress effects appear in every aspect of our lives. Being able to manage these situations more effectively helps us to react and resolve in a more effective way while minimizing the negative symptoms that stress has on our mental and physical being. Stress is the number one mental illness experienced in the workplace.

Relief from Anxiety and Depression

Neurotherapy is an effective intervention for many people suffering from depression, anxiety and/or insomnia without the side-effects of prescription drugs. Your brain wants to heal itself, and can, with the right support.

ADHD & Learning Disabilities

It seems that ADHD and other cognitive symptoms are being diagnoses more frequently. Working with this disorder is stressful, may cause difficulty in performing tasks and remembering things.  Scientific reports show that a demonstrated increase in social interactions and relief of symptoms may be seen in individuals following neurofeedback training.  Many other symptoms associated with ADHD and other LD’s see improvement not only by their family but with their peers. 

Concussion and Concussion Syndrome & Pre-and Post-Concussion Support

Concussion is the leading cause of injuries experienced in sports. Unfortunately, many go undiagnosed. Emotional of psychological symptoms are passed on as being behavioral and not related to an injury. Either way, our technology is very successful in helping to alleviate these symptoms. More importantly, our training helps our athletes stay out of trouble by training their Dynamic Vision Skills and on the other end, helping them return to play much quicker.

Neurofeedback supports your brain in healing after a concussion. After 6 to 12 training sessions, concussed football players reported ease with word retrieval that was formerly lost, sharper thinking, improved sleep, reduced headaches, increased energy levels and reduced anxiety.

Visualization

This is an extremely effective skill to have for both business and sports. It can be the process that one creates a visual image from a recollection of memory or the mental image of what the desired outcome they wish to achieve. Visualization can help build intuition… that connection between mind and muscle helping to improve anticipatory response time.  This skill can also be used to follow set patterns that has a clear beginning and end again reflection how the activity will play out.