Interest of low frequency pulsed sounds in injury recovery

 

ACTIVA-CONCEPTS

 

offers a completely innovative method for acquiring or correcting sports movements o recover a correct motion after injury with or without surgery. We are talking about Motor Program Fast Recording with mental training under low frequency pulsed sounds. This method is a concrete example about the new know-how in the biotechnologies field: non invasive without secondary effects and contra-indications respecting the internal nature of the body and the physiologic characters characteristic of each athleteThis method excludes the failing risks by the competition demands and the performance necessities: physical and mental exhaustions by over training, injuries, falling motivations, doping. With Activa Concepts the motor automatism is taking one’s place between two and four hours in average. Finally we can use this technique to improve any sport technical aspect, difficulty about any locomotor function like hemiplegic, paraparesis, Parkinson, spastic troubles, motor inhibition, reaction time and lastly, one derivate application permits to endow athletes in stressful situation with immediate relaxing effect. In fact, we can also program and pair in one session, expiration and relaxing. After this kind of session, a deep expiration will induce an immediate relaxing state similar to Jacobson or Schultz relaxation. This technique with Activa can be used to alleviate many stress-induced or psychosomatic disorders after injury or in stressful sport situations. We don’t need to repeat a set of visualizations to induce a state of relaxation. Most of the time one session of 20 minutes gives a definitive and excellent result. In rehabilitation, Activa has been thoroughly tested in large audience of national or international injured sportsmen with psychomotor inhibition and a comeback delayed sometimes very distant from the trauma. We can recover the initial function many years after the disorder.

To a very large extent our movements are governed by automatic reflexes that are inherent or learnt. Whether practitioner or trainer, the athlete is constantly challenged with the need to create or to modify movements which are inefficient and usually underlie poor performance or to back to the original movement after injury or surgery without active compensations during the motion.

Teaching and the classic approaches to learning or modifying automatic motor reflexes can hit up against fierce and lasting resistance from ingrained movement techniques. This can lead to the need for lengthy, frequent and tedious training based on repeated practice of the correct movement – learning new motor skills has to involve repetition.

Even then the new motor skills may not be acquired (or only partially so) despite numerous sessions and hours of training. More frequently it involves a heavy cost in terms of physical and psychological trauma and in time.

Today, movements that are resistant to change need no longer be seen as inevitable, as a curse or as a source of discouragement, physical wear or tear, risk of injury or reason to give up – nor as time squandered (and lost). With the ACTIVA methodology means that you no longer run any of these risks nor need to lose so much time. It allows one to adopt sound movement in accordance with the wishes of both the sportsman and the trainer that are immediately effective. The session takes more o less two hours.

ACTIVA is the result of work carried out by a team of national trainers, mental coaches, neuro-physiologists, doctors, sports doctors and sports trainers. This team has perfected a completely safe process which can activate a motor response within the shortest time frame on record.

This technique is using a pulsed sounds generator (GSP). The GSP generates pulsed sounds and the patient receives in his headphones automatically every 10 seconds a low frequency sound of five-seven seconds values. Also he can within reach press a switch on/off manual control producing a sound longer and deeper. He will use this manual control after each mental visualization to anchor the mental process.

The GSP has like objective to help the patient to auto program nervous stimulations sequences adapted for a voluntary motor action with a disinformation of the usual circuit, this second part improving his effectiveness. The sounds generator makes easier the modification of the motor comportments by the patient, in fact the subjective representation of his personal body language that is used in invariable body reference in constant evolution to evaluate the physical and psychological means to his disposition.

The GPS is manipulated and programmed by the own user (who is remaining in control of one’s emotions and comportments). The user has the possibilities to improve his motor reaction time or modify the psychomotor injury or surgery after-effects.

Modus operandi

The basic principle is the sensorial multi-stimulation of sub-cortical cerebral areas involved in the formation and activation of automatic motor programs.

It is the same for the treatment of a sport gestural problematic defect or for the pathological motor functions. There are only the application method and protocol which change.

Beginnings:

Our knowledge of how to acquire sport automatic gesture led us to the conclusion that during the execution itself of the gesture, neither voluntary conscious modification could be induced during the production of the movement. This is the heart of the sport matter: the one and only will is not enough to modify instantaneously the motion in the action.The reason why the athletes, whatever their level needs numerous, very longue and repetitive technical sessions. Automatic movement is driving by a programme. To intercede in the execution step doesn’t modify the programme or very superficially. The repetition is an obligatory stage for any acquisition. Should be longer according the co-ordination capacity

The neurosciences works in the last years provide a determining observation: in the motor areas, the brain functions on the same way to produce a real movement or an imagined movement if this mental image has to be realized in term of proprioception and not visualization.

Our activities concerning mental preparation of high level athletes confirmed this observation, but they showed as well the limits: mental associated imagery (thought in term of kinesthesia of feeling) generates a true effect but fleeting on the quality of the motion, faster or slower broken up by the action itself. Nevertheless there is already a determining improvement: we try to operate out of the action (normally before) in order to intervene not during the motor execution but during the programming. The properties of this type of training are nowadays well known, but still unsatisfactory.

On these beginning basics, we have been induced to think about the nature of the mental message and about the conditions in which it has to be produced to anchor instantaneously a real motor program

This thought has permitted to identify an active principle and a protocol.

Active principle

The principal message formative of the program have to be proprioceptive but he have to be received by the mental areas implicated in the motor programs activation like a significant message to maintain.

As a result of:

1. The subject has to be out of the action. He’s able to create only imagined mental motor messages and these messages have to be proprioceptives.

2. The proprioceptive message has to be received by the subcortical areas who are managing the unconscious motor programs, essentially the thalamus.

3. When these messages reach the subcortical nucleus, they have to be able to be memorized there without repetition.

4. The memorization generally speaking (motion, event…) is getting either by repetition (what we want to avoid), or instantly by added ingredients, named markers.

5. These markers belong to the emotional sphere and are associated by the limbic system.

6. The main message (gestural) have to be accompanied by a second stimuli which belongs to another sensorial sphere, forwarding as well by the thalamus

The active principle reserved is:

The sensorial markers belong to the auditory sphere. For reliability reasons, ease of use and innocuousness, we have selected the sounds. These sound stimuli are located in the low frequency track.

These sounds, alpha wave, are well-known to create an alteration vigilance state and relaxation. They are diffused by a sound generator (GSP), by means of head phones.

Hearing these sounds, the subject reduces out of action his vigilance state. He stays perfectly conscious and awake but he’s not anymore in action context, neither under perception of present environment.

When the subject is in a receptive mood (which intervenes quickly, after a few minutes of sounds listenning), he creates mentally define proprioceptive image, which forms the main central message of the motor program to activate.

As soon as this proprioceptive image is formed, the subject associates it immediately another low frequency sound, using a remote control connected to the generator. This new low frequency sound is the new biological marker.

His brain (limbical subcortical) receives, in a very closed way, two messages by two different sensorial ways. This reception reaches the motor cortex not only through the thalamical way (the one usually used for classical unisensorial messages) but as well through the limbical way, which creates instant memory.

This message is recorded without being necessary to multiply repetitions.

A quick short repetition of 5 or 6 associated messages is recommended in order to secure a minimum of quality of the motor message (proprioceptive). The process works with only one recording.

We replaced a work at the motor execution stage, (demanding so many repetitions, sometimes useless, of one single stimuli in action), by a working method around the formation of the motor program.

The fact to put the subject « out of action » opens the way allowing to stimulate the limbical areas and to deliver them a marked message (double), perceived as significant and being memorized.

 

PROTOCOL

 

The longest part of the protocol lies in the proprioceptive image preparation, which will make the central message of the motor program.

Two observations :

• These activities are well known by sport experts, and do not constitute an innovation.

They do not represent special difficulties during their execution, whatever the technical level. More than 350 treated cases confirm it.

The sport protocol is made up of these following stages:

1. Technical analysis with the trainer, based on video documents of the subject in action.

2. Elementary biomechanical analysis of the wanted gesture.

3. Proprioceptive analysis of the wanted gesture: identification of « kinesthetic signature » and of somatic sensations in action.

4. Sonic marking session.

5. Execution of the new gesture in action with video. Validation.

SPECIFIC ACTION MODE

 

We get the same principle to treat a pathological motor problems but the protocol is different.

Method instructions in case of motor inhibition. The method can be use to resolve injuries subjects after surgery or any trauma with varied stage of motor affectation.

Problematical

These sportsmen have benefited surgery, treatment, rehabilitation to restore complete motor functions. After the average time recovery, they does not have any more pain, the articular mechanic is recovered, the muscular potential too but most of the time for many months they cannot back at the same expertise level than before the injury or surgery. The body language does not have the same preciseness and fluidity.

It is a psychomotric inhibition phenomenon, which can affect durably, definitely even, the gestural ability.

The well-known fact is simple but in part limited. During the physical suffering and/or moving impossibility, the usual motor program brain driven, has been suspended to forbid to the body dangerous moves.

When the body recovers his capacities, the brain automatically reactivates progressively the former motor program and restores it completely when the motor functions are fully recovered.

That is the normal way, fortunately the most observed. However, it is happening for non-identified reasons, the brain does not reactive the complete anterior program and follows to program a corporal protection comportment. In a word, the body has back to carry out the full gestural abilities but the brain does not give it the order. It is only a question psychic inhibition phenomenon sometimes very difficult to reduce because it can become cumulative and to be the beginning of additional obsessional disorders.

Operating procedure

In the same way we can modify a gesture by neuromotor reprogramming, we can use the method to reprogram the previous gestural ability by reactivate the original programs.

In the same way we can modify a gesture by neuromotor reprogramming using the method to reprogram the previous gestural ability by reactivate the previous programs.

The active principle and the protocol are the same, but we can carry out two different ways the proprioceptive identification phase who is using of reprogramation base according to the nature and the degree of the inhibition and the feelings of the subject.

• Either the correct gesture proprioception is identified and reactivated mentally on the affected member.

• Or this identification and reactivation are targeted at the valid/ functioning member, and then transferred mentally to the affected member.

We have obtained comparable results with both methods.

• High level skier, who has had an operation after a wrench of crossed ligaments knee. The surgery, the muscular and mechanics rehabilitation of several months have been successful, as well as the disappearance of pain and the recovery of her muscular mass (quadriceps, triceps, half- strings). Whether, she didn’t get back her flexion amplitude neither her total vertical impulse capacity. Her improvement had been stopped for many months and her sport career seriously compromised.

The recovery of her ability has been realized identifying the proprioception on her valid leg with a mental transfer on her affected leg.

• Same case and same solution for a high level basket player (US international) who had never got back the whole ability of her leg and who had played during many years after her surgery thanks to a more or less efficient bodily strategy of substitution.

• Case of a high level amateur football player, victim of multiple fractures to his ankle. The recovery of his motor ability has been implemented one year after stimulating a direct proprioception on his affected ankle.

 

PROCESS APPLICATION ON CASES OF DAMAGED MOTOR FUNCTION BY HEMIPLEGIA OF AVC ORIGIN

These cases do not belong to the sport motor function sphere according to the strictest definition. We list them as memory.

The objectives, the contents and the protocols are fundamentally different. They are work in progress.

It is in these cases to reduce notably the spasticity in order to recreate the elementary gesture reprogramming conditions.

First of all, the process allows to create, in the same way, muscular relaxation program conditions. When this state is reached, then it is possible to re-activate partially motor programs according to a process closed to the one used for sport gesture.

We have treated about 10 patients in an exploratory way. The results have spoken for themselves that the French medical authority, in the name of 3 professors decide to implement in hospital about 10 pilot/experimental tests. These tests have proved to be positive. Now we study a clinic experimentation protocol in order to ratify the process by the French medical and sanitary authorities.