The integration of nervous system regulation into sports medicine will transform the direction of human health & sports performance.  Research shows how you live, how long you live, and more importantly how well you live depends directly on the intricate balance of your nervous system. The basis of competition and the fundamental brutality of sports give rise to unstable nervous systems and ill health. It is essential for athletes to understand how to counterbalance instability to reduce problems and improve performance.

According to the National Safety Council (NSC), there are 8.6 million sports– and recreation-related injury episodes annually. Males (61.3%) and persons aged 5-24 years (64.9%) accounted for more than one-half of injury episodes injuries.  

Old thinking is sports injuries occur due to overtraining, lack of conditioning, and improper form or technique. Science now knows this is not the whole picture. What is now known is that sports injuries are caused by prolonged stress activation.

Short term stress releases a flood of stress hormones, including adrenaline and cortisol, which rouse the body for emergency action. Your heart pounds faster, muscles tighten, blood pressure rises, breath quickens, and your senses become sharper. This is all good for survival or competition, but not good if the stress the prolonged.

Prolonged stress causes cognitive- attentional changes (e.g., narrowing of attention, general distraction, increased self-consciousness) that interfere with an athlete’s performance. Stress has been shown to decrease circulation and activate muscle tension, increasing an athlete’s risk of injury. All strains and sprains to: muscles,  ligaments, tendons, fascia and bursae are a result of over stressed bodies.  Science agrees that prolonged stress reduces athletic performance.

Dolphin-MPS Therapy is scientifically proven to reduce stress in order to activate HRV and Exercise tolerance. Dolphin-MPS Therapy is the ideal modality for Sports medicine because it is the ONLY modality today that  treats the underlying causes of all sports injuries – sympathetic stress activation.

MPS protocols approach sports medicine using and integrative body-wide systems-oriented approach which isolate the influence of sports injuries on the whole person, not just an isolated set of symptoms.

The very science of sports performance is based on the delicate balance of the autonomic nervous system (ANS = sympatho-vagal balance) within our bodies.

Standard Deviation Average Norm-to-Norm (SDANN) is a bi-product of this delicate balance. SDANN represents VO2 max, and is considered the scientific metric for exercise tolerance. Specifically, SDANN measures the maximum volume of oxygen that the body can consume during intense, whole-body exercise while breathing air at sea level (ml/kg/min), for longer than four to five minutes.

SDANN or VO2 max is the most widely documented of all automatic nervous system (ANS) stress markers and used as a standardized test for athletic ability throughout the world. Improving your VO2 max by 10% without changing any other performance factors can take more than a minute off your 5K race times and a 5% improvement over average race times.

Oxygen utilization holds great relevance in understanding human metabolism. The amount of oxygen consumed (at the cellular level) reflects energy utilization and the amount of work performed by the body. High numbers (>=40 ml/kg/min) are usually seen in athletes, and improvement in VO2 max indicates improved ANS response and exercise tolerance. Elite athletes are considered to score above 55 ml/kg/min.

SDANN VO2max has an inverse relationship with sympathetic stress. SDANN is suppressed during increased stress (during training), and enhanced with stress reduction during recovery. Prolonged sympathetic stress and cortisol, which is an endocrine stress marker, will result in sub-par sports performance.