Matéria muito bem feita sobre o trabalho de biofeedback realizado pela Dr. Penny Werthner, ex-professora da Universidade de Ottawa e considerada umas das 50 mulheres mais influentes do esporte Canadense em 2010. Particularmente esse trecho abaixo foi o que mais gostei:
"O que eu disse ao Manny (atleta canadense) foi que a preparação física e tática são as primeiras em qualquer esporte. Se você não as faz, não importa mais nada do que você fizer" disse Werthner, "mas se você fizer isso (as preparações téctinas e físicas) e manter-se saudável, então como você controla a si mesmo nos dias de competição é o que realmente separa os vencedores dos perdedores."
Aproveitem a leitura completa do artigo em inglês.
Osborne-Paradis counting on mind over matter to reach the podium in Sochi
ALLAN MAKI
CALGARY —
The Globe and Mail
Last updated Tuesday, Jan. 21 2014, 9:54 AM EST
Manny’s brain waves are dancing in Technicolor. They are bars on a
computer screen being read by one of the many electrodes attached to his
head, shoulders and various fingers on his left and right hand. It is a
red, blue, green, yellow, orange-coded signal that Manuel
Osborne-Paradis is ready to race.
But not on skis. Not on a mountainside where the B.C.-born downhiller has won three World Cup alpine events.
At
this moment, in room B261 of the University of Calgary kinesiology
department, Osborne-Paradis is reclining in an easy chair preparing to
race a sailboat – with his mind.
It’s pretty simple, or at least
seems that way. As long as Osborne-Paradis concentrates on his yellow
sailboat, his brain activity makes it move. As soon as he has a lapse in
attentiveness, or lets some speeding thought cut across his bow, his
boat stops and a rival one moves – in this case, the purple boat that
begins to make a charge. Osborne-Paradis stares at the screen as his
boat begins to pull away cleanly.
“He couldn’t have done that three or four weeks ago,” Penny Werthner, the U of C’s dean of kinesiology, says in admiration.
This
is how it is for Osborne-Paradis as he engages in another countdown to
another Olympics: He is leaving no stone or computer chip unturned in
his quest to be the best come the 2014 Sochi Winter Games.
Physically,
he is fine. He has recovered from the 2011 crash in Chamonix, France,
that broke his left leg, tore up his left knee and cost him almost two
seasons. Therapy and conditioning have brought him to a level where, at
29, he is near the peak of health.
But to get better and improve
on his racing, Osborne-Paradis decided there were other things he could
do, such as hone his mental edges. That pursuit took him to Werthner, a
sports psychologist and former Olympic runner, whose biofeedback and
neurofeedback sessions help athletes learn how to calm themselves so
they can let their physical training take over and compete efficiently.
Werthner
has worked with dozens of athletes, including curler Cheryl Bernard and
moguls skier Alexandre Bilodeau, who won silver and gold, respectively,
at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, along with other medal winners from the
2012 London Summer Games.
Much of what Werthner heard from
athletes was how they were too anxious, too overwhelmed before a major
competition. They had spent so much energy worrying about an Olympics
they were exhausted before they got there.
Werthner’s work is
about “enabling the athletes to learn how to self-regulate themselves
both physiologically and neurologically. It’s like training the brain
the way you train the muscles in the body. Manny has been really
open-minded about this, and good to work with.”
Osborne-Paradis
was keen to reset himself after the Vancouver Games. Considering how
well he had done in 2009, winning three World Cup races and finishing
third in another, considering the Olympic downhill was being staged on
his home mountain, Osborne-Paradis was elevated by fans and media to
sure medal status. His Canadian teammates experienced similar
expectations. They didn’t live up to them; Osborne-Paradis finished a
disappointing 17th in the downhill.
Then came the leg-wrecking
crash in France followed by a silly incident during the 2011 Calgary
Stampede, where Manny, being good-time Manny, tried to hitch a ride on
the back of a party bus, only to be dragged almost 80 metres. That put
him in a hospital with a bad case of road rash. It was time to rethink
things.
“Part of my M.O. is to be the fun-loving guy, but as you
get older you don’t have the energy to be that guy all the time. I’m not
20 any more,” he says.
The measure of his physical comeback came
this past March in Kvitfjell, Norway, where Osborne-Paradis turned in a
resounding fourth-place showing. For the 2013-14 Olympic buildup, he
vowed to explore every option, renting a private lane on a Whistler ski
run for three days for himself and coach Stefan Guay.
There was
also an early trip to Switzerland so he could train in the Alps with the
French national team. That was before he headed to France to attend a
training camp with his Canadian teammates.
It was enough for
Martin Rufener, Alpine Canada’s new head coach, to remark recently: “You
can just tell that his mental focus and mental strength is there and
that’s important.”
Alpine Canada knew of Werthner’s skill in
dealing with world-class athletes and asked to be part of her program.
Osborne-Paradis was keen to see what could be done. The idea, he was
told, was to train his mind so he could “stay in the moment” for two
minutes, the average length of a men’s downhill.
The first few
hour-long sessions didn’t seem to accomplish much. During the tests,
sensors monitor his heart rate, its variability, his peripheral body
temperature and his skin conductance, how much he sweats, a sign
Osborne-Paradis is engaged both physiologically and psychologically.
Eventually,
Osborne-Paradis learned how to co-ordinate his breathing, how to relax
his muscles to keep them from getting too tense – and also how to
crystallize his thoughts. Seeing the results on a computer screen has
given him the tools and confidence he will carry over to the mountains.
“The
game with the sailboats, you think about something else, your boat
stops and another sailboat moves. The other boat is another part of your
brain and you have to regain your composure,” he explains. “It’s like
in a race, where there’s music playing [over loudspeakers]. You hear
athletes say later that they never heard any music because they were so
into their race, in the zone. You need that in skiing. It’s about not
getting too overzealous in what’s going on until you’re at the finish.
“You have to learn where to go in your head.”
Osborne-Paradis’s
head is a comfortable place for him to be, although the work continues.
Before leaving for Sochi, he and Werthner hope to have another four or
five sessions. The next step will be having Osborne-Paradis visualize
the course in Sochi’s Rosa Khutor alpine resort and racing it in his
mind.
“What I told Manny was that physical preparation and
technical preparation is No. 1 in any sport. If you don’t do that it
doesn’t matter what else you do,” Werthner says. “But then if you do
that and stay healthy, then how you can manage yourself on competition
day is really what separates the people who win and the people who don’t
win.”
In room B261, the testing continues. Osborne-Paradis is
instructed on-screen to “let the puppet stand as tall as possible.” An
animated puppet is shown squatting until Manny wills it to stand up.
Another
exercise: “Let the light bulb glow warmly.’ A light-bulb image appears
and soon glows warmly. Manny stares at the computer. He is in the
moment, yet on his way to Sochi.
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