Olympic secrets revealed - Maclean’s exclusive: An inside look at our high-tech, mind-bending plans to dominate the podium at the 2010 Games

http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/01/12/olympic-secrets-revealed/2/

Olympic secrets revealed - Maclean’s exclusive: An inside look at our high-tech, mind-bending plans to dominate the podium at the 2010 Games

MIND GAMES
It was a bit unsettling at first, admits freestyle aerialist Kyle Nissen, to be wired with electrodes and see your various brainwaves, alpha, beta, theta, dancing on a computer screen; and watching it track every shift in respiration, heart rate, body temperature, sweat levels and muscle tension. “I was a little bit skeptical,” says the 10-year member of the national team. It helped that he had a long, trusting relationship with the woman at the controls, University of Ottawa sports psychologist Penny Werthner.

It’s one thing to tell your sports shrink you are mentally focused and physically loose, quite another to prove it through Werthner’s bio (physical) and neuro (mental) feedback machines. “Sport psychology is about what we’re thinking and what we’re feeling and you can’t really see those things,” Werthner says. “I find it a really intriguing and useful tool to make things a bit more concrete.”

The process of “self discovery,” as she puts it, began three years ago, and includes both the aerial ski team and top mogulists Alex Bilodeau and Jennifer Heil. Discovery is only the first step: the aim is to control one’s physical and mental response, to gear up in the moments before a performance, and as importantly, to learn to mellow out afterwards. “The season can be a real grind, so it’s important to stay fresh out there,” says veteran boarder Warren Shouldice. “It obviously stresses you out to think, ‘I’ve got to go off this four-metre-tall jump at 70 km/h.’ So if I can not think about that, it’s a good thing,” he says. “Yes, I want to think about it, but that’s for the 30 seconds before my jump.”

He and Nissen have learned to take mini-mental holidays on the lift up to their next jump and to put a higher premium on recovery time. They once spent down time blazing away at video games like Call of Duty or Guitar Hero until they wired up the feedback machines and discovered that what they thought was mindless fun was leaving them highly stressed. “We’re competitive people,” says Nissen. Now, they spend maybe 15 minutes listening to audio of slow human breathing: “You could almost call it meditation.” . . . .