Neuroscience-Based Feedback Can Boost Sports Kids’ Confidence

In the latest Building Confidence in Young Athletes podcast, Konstantin Sonkin, a neuroscientist and CEO at i-BrainTech, describes how giving real-time feedback to sports kids while they’re visualizing a game or practice can boost their confidence and performance.

Listen:

Sonkin developed a sports-specific training game platform that provides insights into characteristics like focus and motor control.

“When you really visualize action in all details, our mind does exactly the same preparation, exactly the same work as before the actual movement,” he said during the interview. “And that allows us to use visualization to prepare regions of the brain responsible for decision-making and motor control to facilitate readiness for real life scenarios.”

To develop his program, Sonkin asked himself if he could quantify how well athletes visualize actions–and then give them feedback in real time that would boost their performance. With the feedback, they can exercise different parts of the brain responsible for making decisions and executing them, he said.

To do this type of training, athletes wear a brain sensor cap and see an avatar associated with their specific sport—basketball, soccer or volleyball.

Using the iBrain-Tech programs, they might be prompted to visualize a penalty kick, or a long ball, or a foul shot, for example. 

Athletes have eight seconds to visualize those moves in detail.

“You need to activate your areas of the brain responsible for concentration, decision-making and motor control. And if you do so, your avatar will execute perfect action,” Sonkin said.  Otherwise, athletes learn what they could do  better–exert more power, for example, or focus better.

Athletes visualize  a full game, controlling their avatars with their mind. The platform gives them real-time feedback.

Athletes visualize, have eight seconds to improve how they visualize, and the feedback targets specific areas of the brain that should be engaged.

“In addition to a couple of reps on the pitch, our young athletes are able to visualize hundreds of critical activities relevant for their position, for their age, for their preferred foot, so they can put so many more reps into their learning curve, so they acquire skills much faster and in case they’re injured, they can protect them them during their off -the -field period,” he said.

This process involves trial-and-error.

“For example, you’ve got a kid who’s asked to score a goal and he misses. And then he tries again, and that helps him figure out how the visualization works,” Sonkin said.

 Skills–such as improved focus–that sports kids learn are often transferred to school.

“They are able now to focus for a longer period of time, so they are academically better, and then in turn it builds their confidence because they’re more successful in school and in their favorite sports,” Sonkin said.

You can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts.