Vestibular Integration and Sports Enhancement

Maximizing Our Peak Performance in Sports Training

What is involved in getting our bodies to perform efficiently and effectively?Before we can perform any task skillfully, including hitting a baseball,our brains must integrate million and even billions of bits of sensoryand motor information. Messages from our eyes; ears; skin; muscles andjoints; and our balance mechanism, must all be coordinated to give us theability to respond in the most adaptive way possible.

Balance and timing, as well as body map and body schemais also something that can be improved in all of us no matter our age. Coordination and rhythm is needed to find peak performance at the next level. Just as Frappier Acceleration is used to improve strength and acceleration, and as vision training is helpful in competitive and team sports, a systematic application of auditory training techniques can help rhythm, balance, timing and body schema.

At the Spectrum Center we combine Tomatis Auditory Training with Vestibular Integration Gym. By doing so, we perform a "soft reset" on the vestibular system, which produces a better sense of balance and gravitation.

In the beginning years of our Program, clients were encouraged (and required) to have their bodies involved in the overall treatment program. While their ears and brains were processing the Tomatis treatment, their bodies were actively climbing, swinging, crawling and so forth. As the result of this, many children achieved a level of mind-body integration that would not have been possible with merely passive listening.
The results that parents immediately noticed were the child's ability
to make eye contact, and the overall improvement in bodily coordination.
Recently we have taken this approach farther:
We have developed a new program that is now available at the Spectrum Center , called Advanced Listening Sports Training. This program builds upon the foundation of listening and sensory skills that were initially established through the Tomatis Listening Training. Where the Tomatis Listening Training focuses on the ear and gravitation as the fundamental focus of therapy, the Advanced Listening Sports Training program focuses on a variety of higher order processing abilities executive functionsof the mind-body apparatus.

Valerie Dejean is an occupational therapist who has been working withlearning disabled children for the past 20 years. She has found that byimproving the skills needed for academic success, there is often a remarkableimprovements in the children's athletic abilities.

They can swim faster, they can hit the ball further, and their strengthand endurance improves. None of this is surprising because the same abilitiesthat are the foundations for academic skills are also the foundation forathletic skills.

Atthe Spectrum Center we study what these foundations are and how we canchange how our brains integrate sensory information more acurately, howwe can use music, movement, body and eye exercises to impact our brainsso that we can move in the direction of maximizing our peak performance.

Our program concentrates on how balance, weight shifting, and eye hand coordination can all be improved. This system should be of interest to anyone who wants to improve how his brain takes in, sorts out, and responds to information. This is information that can help us all become more efficient, effective, and successful in our sports as well as in our lives..

Our theory, based on the findings of Tomatis and the sensory integration pioneer Jean Ayres, is that the ear is the most fundamental of the five senses, being responsible for both hearing and balance. And the interesting point is this. By treating the ear through "listening training" we are also affecting the ear's function of balance. This sense of balance is essential if the child is to differentiate between the inner and the outer, between the self and the other, between the "me" and the "thou". For example, our success with autistic children is based on the premise that the child needs to know where his body ends and the outer world begins. As soon as we see a little improvement using Tomatis, the child enters a phase where he reenters the "terrible twos", and begins punching things and otherwise wreaking havoc with the outside environment. The child has finally discovered his body!

Now your child lies somewhere on the coordination continuum between, say, the extremely impaired, and professional sports players. To improve anybody on this continuum, we must treat these higher order processing abilities and executive functions. These include laterality and interhemispheric communication, motor planning and praxis, and visual as well as auditory processing abilities. All this is within the rubric of a strong sensory integration bias in our therapy. The Advanced Listening Sports Training program builds upon the gains made during the Tomatis listening training and applies them toward the advancement of higher level skills.

Listening as well as Active Measures in voice-feedback training using the Tomatis electronic filtering process often results in accelerated achievement of personal objectives and potential in sports.