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SXSW Sports 2017: How Olympian Natasha Hastings Trains With Halo Neuroscience

AUSTIN, Texas — Daniel Chao believes Halo Neuroscience can accelerate human performance through neurostimulation and help athletes like Olympian sprinter Natasha Hastings achieve a competitive advantage from the neck up.

He moderated a panel last weekend at the annual South by Southwest Conference called “Unlocking the Brain’s Full Potential in Athletics,” which included Hastings, her coach Darryl Woodson and Lance Walker, Global Dir. of Performance at Michael Johnson Performance. 

Chao, who is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Halo Neuroscience, explained to SportTechie that when worn by athletes like Hastings prior to training for about 20 minutes, the Halo Sport stimulates the motor cortex part of the brain, which controls body movements and helps them become more reflexive.

“The idea here is what if we could use neurostimulation to prime this part of the brain so it is in a state of hyper-learning such that when you feed this part of the brain in training repetitions, the athlete gets more neurologically from those training sessions,” he said. “It’s really about hitting at the neurologic efficiency of training, and if we could accelerate the brain games from athletic training,”

Hastings utilized the Halo Sport headset prior to the 2016 Rio Olympics and said on the panel that incorporating Neuropriming sessions into her training regimen hasn’t necessarily meant she’s training harder, but rather the “training is more efficient.”

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“I just turned 30, and I’m in a different phase in my career. I know that the things I could do at 22 I can’t necessarily do at 30,” she said. “Now, I can perform just as well or even better but I’m at a phase in my career where the mindless going out and doing a hundred repetitions, and I don’t know what I’m doing, if I’m doing it right…I want the feedback to know that what I’m doing, I’m doing it properly. If I’m doing the wrong things, then those wrong things become habits. I want the right things to become habits.”

Movement-based training that the Halo Sport could accelerate, as highlighted by Chao, could include golfers putting a ball, basketball players shooting a free throw and track athletes jumping higher. Walker of Michael Johnson Performance said that when evaluating new forms of technology and training, there’s three questions he and the athletes he is working with, like Hastings, ask themselves.

“Is it ethical? Is it efficient? It’s got to be more efficient than what I’m already doing. Three, it’s got to be effective,” Walker said. “My problem is, some people only run one of those three filters through the tunnel. It’s got to be this, that and this. If it doesn’t match all three, we’re not going to consider it.”

Hastings said that the information from the technology can’t be a distraction as well and “play with your mind.”

“You need to look at the data and make sure it’s not something that someone just threw together. Make sure this is backed up and there’s some studies,” she added.

Through the use of the Halo Sport, Walker and Chao both reiterated how it could lessen significantly the amount of repetitive training an athlete does. As a result, there would be less “foot contact” overall, which would lighten the stress on Hastings’ tendons and ultimately heighten the quality of her training, as Walker described.

Still, despite working with Olympians such as Hastings and a handful of NFL players like Cleveland Browns linebacker Demario Davis and Oakland Raiders cornerback T.J. Carrie, some researchers are still skeptical of how and if the technology can impact human performance quite yet.

“I think it’s unlikely that we understand enough to be able to successfully use it for that kind of thing at the moment,” said Charlotte Stagg, Head of the Physiological Neuroimaging Group in the Department of Clinical Neurosciences at University of Oxford to MIT Technology Review last July.

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