Neurotechnology for Sport

To improve your reaction time there are many methods available such as light systems, catching rulers, responding to audio cues from your coach, catching balls, and using strobe glasses. These are all great methods to improve your reaction time if you have limited resources.  One of the most important aspects of improving reaction time is having enough load on the brain to make significant lasting changes. So doing 10-20 reps of a reaction-based task is NOT going to be sufficient to make changes within the brain. Most research studies will perform cognitive tasks for 20 minutes or longer to induce high enough levels of mental fatigue. This would add up to 800 + or more repetitions!   In the brain, skills are not refined unless we perform a huge amount of reps and usually to fatigue. If you think about your sport, that’s how you arrived where you are today, you practiced over and over for years, performing hundreds of thousands of reps over that time. Reaction time is a sk...

With a now greater understanding of how the visual system influences athletic performance, eye tracking has become a point of fascination in high-performance  sport. However, the expense of implementing eye-tracking technology often  extremely high. T here are many commercially available eye-tracking systems out  there that will give sport scientists the data they need to analyze an athletes visual habits . We believe eye tracking is hugely undervalued as a real training tool and should form another piece of the puzzle in high-performance sports.  Soma Technologies focuses on providing a mobile, affordable eye tracking solution for teams, clubs and brands, making it easy to implement an eye tracking cognitive training solution into their environment.  Soma NPT Vision utilises existing eye tracking software in mobile devices, rather than reinventing the wheel and making new eye-tracking hardware and producing large screens. Using mobile devices is a far more pr...

Sport is becoming much more data-driven and teams, coaches, and brands want to look deeper look into an athlete’s cognitive performance. There are many fantastic systems available to track an athlete’s physical performance and manage their physical training load, but there are very few options when it comes to cognitive load monitoring.  The brain is the most overlooked aspect of performance and without it we do not  function. The brain is responsible for everything. Without a fine-tuned brain performance does not exist. In order to track an a thlete’s cognitive performance ,  you need to be looking at more than one metric. In this article, we will cover 4  important metrics for cognitive performance.  Currently, in the sports industry, there is a huge amount of hype around reaction  time but reaction time alone is just not enough to track cognitive performance or  cognitive fatigue. Below we will dive into each metric you should be measuring in...

With sports vision, you use specific drills to train the various skills placed on the visual system in sports. In this article, we will outline the most important sports vision drills with the highest payoff.  Sports vision is becoming more popular recently. With the extensive demands sport places on an athlete’s visual system, it only makes sense to train it. Improved sports vision can have a positive impact on an athlete’s performance and many athletes notice the benefits from training the visual system specifically.   Vision training can be a rabbit hole and it pays to have an understanding on what to train and how to train it. Walking into sports vision training without any knowledge can put an athlete at risk of over or underloading the system, thus negating the possible benefits. Much like walking into a gym with no knowledge of how to use the equipment or even which equipment to use.   However, sports vision does not have to be overwhelming. We have ...

Visual skills for Sports Sports vision training  helps an athlete improve their visual skills so they can process information faster, make more accurate decisions and see things without looking.  Smooth Pursuits Smooth pursuit movements are reflexive eye movements that are required when  an object through an environment. The eyes move smoothly instead of I  jump. Can your athlete accurately track an object while it is moving and at different speeds  without losing focus? This skill is very basic but many athletes lose focus and need  to re-fixate due to visual fatigue. Saccades A saccade is a quick, jerk-like, simultaneous movement of both eyes between two  or more points of fixation in the same direction. Switching your eyes quickly to a target is fairly straightforward forward but are you able to  do this at high speed and with accuracy? or does your athlete need to constantly re-fixate on the target? Are they over shooting or undershooting? The...