#134 - The Missing Link in Athletic Performance: Brain Mapping & Neurofeedback with Dr. Kevin Butterfield, Part 1

Welcome to The Factor Podcast, where we talk about the stuff they didn't teach you in school. How to grow your practice, refine your clinical skills, and get better results for your patients. We're here to help you navigate the real-world challenges of being a healthcare provider, from delivering top-notch patient care to running a business that doesn't run you into the ground. Whether you're fresh out of school or scaling your practice, we're diving into effective cutting-edge treatments to get patients better faster. We'll also talk about business strategies and tactics to help you work smarter and not harder, and the mindset shifts required to thrive as a top performer in your field so you can build a career you love without burning out. If you're ready to learn what works and what doesn't from leading experts, industry innovators, and respected clinicians across a wide range of specialties, you're in the right place, my friend. Let's dive in. When we think about improving athletic performance, most clinicians immediately focus on movement quality, strength, mobility, Recovery, and biomechanics. But what if we've been overlooking the most important performance system of all? The brain. Welcome back to The Factor Podcast, where we explore the latest evidence, emerging technologies, and clinical strategies to help healthcare providers deliver better outcomes for their patients. I'm your host, Jessica Riddle, and today we're excited to feature a special training from the Better Brains, Better Futures podcast. Hosted by Seth Kalin. Better Brains, Better Futures is the newest member of the Factor Podcast Network, where we bring you conversations from trusted partners and thought leaders who are advancing evidence-informed healthcare. If Dr. Kevin Butterfield's name sounds familiar, well, there's a good reason for that. He previously joined us on our episodes 115 and 116, where we explored the science of neurofeedback and its clinical applications. In this new 2-part conversation, Seth sits down with Dr. Butterfield to take that discussion even further, exploring how quantitative EEG brain mapping and neurofeedback are changing the way clinicians think about performance optimization, concussion recovery, and cognitive resilience. From youth athletes to professional competitors, they make the case that physical preparation alone isn't enough. And that understanding how the brain functions may unlock an entirely new level of human performance. Let's jump into part 1 of today's feature training.

Thank you all for joining. Dr. Kevin Butterfield here with me, Seth Kalin with Hippocampus Labs, and we are talking about The Athlete's Hidden Advantage. There's no secret there. We're going to be talking about brain mapping, peak performance, and EEG neurofeedback. So there's a lot of power that's within your hands with this, and I will let Dr. Butterfield get started so we can kind of get— so without further ado, Dr. Butterfield.

Without further ado.

All right.

Yeah. So this, we're going to talk a lot about the brain mapping, like Seth said, and the EEG neurofeedback and brain mapping. If you're already doing this in your practice, that's awesome. Maybe we can help you expand a little bit on it. If you're not doing it in your practice and you want to, you'll find out why this is probably a good idea to do that. Because we all, in our practices, we see athletes from youth to middle school, high school, college, and some of us see the pros. So the key thing that every— all those people do is to do the physical performance stuff, and they leave the brain out of it, which it should be the other way around. All right, so Again, you guys can read this. I'm not— we're not giving you medical advice or diagnosing anything or any of your conditions. You should seek all that information out from a licensed medical professional for any health concerns. Okay, this is just a disclaimer.

One more disclaimer on that. We have some professional athletes that we'll be showing during this presentation and a couple of quotes that you'll see. They are promoting and referring to neurofeedback as the benefit and the major changes that it's had in their lives. But we have not contacted them or gotten approval from them for Hippocampus Labs. But in neurofeedback in general, they are major proponents in the industry and in the professional sports world. So just wanted to make a note of that.

Excellent. All right, the leadership team. I'm Dr. Butterfield. I've been a chiropractor for a long time. I've been doing neurofeedback for 26 years now, and that's all I do. Is the neurofeedback. I do anything from kids with ADD, kids on the spectrum, depression, anxiety, all the way. It's now more— I do some peak performance brain training for professional athletes, IndyCar drivers, NASCAR drivers, and NFL players. That's what I do. And I'm trying to show or help other practitioners across the country to employ this in their office because it's such a valuable asset. Valuable tool in your toolbox.

So myself, nutritional therapy practitioner, board certified holistic nutrition. I've worked with Dr. Butterfield since back in 2016 when I met him when I was working as a manufacturer rep for a functional medicine supplement company. And there's a core major correlation, direct correlation, bidirectional relationship between the brain and the metabolic system, obviously. So I've worked a lot with the metabolic system as far as supplementation, diet changes, lifestyle influences to impact the brain health. Never before have I been— had enough power to be able to make changes directly to the brain with a technology like this. So now with combining them, we're able to actually have a much faster impact on individuals' lives and practices as well because they're able to combine those things. Because many healthcare practitioners and the ones that we're working with are in the functional medicine or holistic space, and they are applying those methodologies already to support the natural function of the body. And now with neurofeedback, we're actually directly influencing the brain energy and the brain waves, so that way the brain is providing more brain energy to give more motivation, more clarity, more focus to individuals so they can actually follow through with lifestyle recommendations for your patients. So they would— when they go home, they have that energy, that mindset, that clarity to make a decision that's better for them rather than grabbing a glass of wine. That's the The de-stressor of the day. So that's my experience. Been doing that for quite a while. I was with that company for over 12 years. Now I've got a holistic health and wellness space that I have, 27 employees, over 7,000 square feet that I have with focusing on the real-world impact of self-care and support for individuals in my community. And neurofeedback is a big part of that. We've just been implementing that and getting some great successes. Dan Court was one of my largest accounts when I was with that supplement company. And he was not only an amazing practitioner, an amazing human being to helping as many people as he could at scale. He had multiple successes prior to him actually getting into the nutritional holistic realm of multiple businesses that he was able to build from scratch and sell to multi-billion dollar companies. And the reason that's relevant, and I bring that up is because Our purpose and our mission is to be able to take neurofeedback and make it a well-known modality in healthcare practices and support you to be able to implement this from a successful business manner so you can get the best results that you can with your practices. So, we're combining all the best of both worlds, the best of neurofeedback with Dr. Butterfield and his success in clinical practice and business as well, myself with the holistic perspective of how to support the metabolic system, and Dan with bringing that additional layer of business support and clinical support. And just our team, as far as the leadership team and all of our team that we have in the background, are really here to support you to be able to scale this in your office to whatever degree that you would like to.

Okay, now here we go. Why, why the brain-based training? Like I said, a lot of the athletes out there and the top-tier athletes, they work on their body so much, which is good. They got the best oxygen capacity in their lungs to last longer, but They got everything they can go going for them from the neck down. But some athletes, or a lot of athletes probably, use neurofeedback as well. I mean, it's— the mental fatigue accumulates faster than muscular fatigue. Obviously, you're going to get burned out in your brain. If you're going to lose your focus, you're going to get stray in your thought process, which will slow you down. But if you focus on the brain while you do the body, that's the comprehensive approach that you should do. Again, the cost of not doing it is whether you finish on the podium or your team wins or doesn't win. All the brains are working, firing the best they could. That's an unstoppable force. So to add in the neurofeedback or the neurological precision training, that's the missing piece that most of these teams don't have and should have. Okay, yeah, the brain is your, your performance engine that controls everything else in your whole body. So you have to have the proper Firing of the signals, the brainwaves got to be in a certain range, which is normal for them to be able to communicate in the brain better, to send all that information down to your body. It increases your reaction speed, your attention and focus, obviously, your emotional stability. So you don't have these meltdowns and it helps you recover quicker because you don't burn yourself up or burn your muscles up or—

So we've all heard the phrase before, head's not in the game, they were making mistakes. And we've seen it on the big screen. You've probably seen it in news sports. That there is— when somebody is making mistakes and it's having a major impact and they're just not in the right mindset, there are performance breakdowns. And so they're not physically not in the game, but they're mentally not in the game, which is affecting their physical performance. So when your brain's under competitive stress, it's dysregulated and it's not able to respond appropriately. It's misfiring. So that's a major bottleneck for a lot of these youth athletes and professional athletes. to actually being at their peak performance. So cognitive drift, that's one of those things where when there's a stressor that they're receiving or they're having in the game, and they are not able to react as quickly as they should because their brain is not able to— is not trained in order to be able to respond appropriately, or they've had a certain amount of stress that they've been under that they've been not able to adapt or recover, so they're fatigued. They're not able to respond. So they're having some neural inefficiency. Their brain is consuming more power and it produces more— it takes more power than it actually is producing. So that's a major inefficiency for individuals when they're trying to be at the top of their game. And then a lot of that also has some correlation, again, like I talked about before, with the metabolic system. We have to support the lifestyle. We have to support the fuel for the brain so that way you can respond appropriately. But if the brainwaves are out of sync, Or whether it's been through damage of concussion or through stress or through anxiety and other things, maybe it's a chemical nature of things that they're eating poorly, that inefficiency is gonna impact their brainwaves, which is gonna take them out of the game. Their head's not gonna be where it should be to be able to— firing at all cylinders. And when it's dysregulated, when it's not performing at its best, there are times where that's increasing injury risk. Whether it's footwork and the way that the athlete is moving around its opponent, It's, it's not placing their feet where it's supposed to be. Maybe that's an ankle injury, or maybe it's a racer that has a split-second decision that they have to make, and that is the difference between getting into a crash or hitting the wall or not. So it's a major impact if that brain's not firing on all cylinders. So got to get the head in the game, and that's where neurofeedback actually complements and helps people be able to get— be at their most heightened capability and most focused and relaxed. So it's a, it's not just where they're just gonna be on steady alert. They're also able to become relaxed and be able to have emotional regulation when it's appropriate for the different sports.

And we'll talk about that. Yeah, I would, I would jump in and say the classic example of that one is Simone Biles. Remember in the Olympics, she did the twisties or whatever. She couldn't jump. Her, her brain wasn't in it.

Yeah.

So she just withdrew from the Olympics cuz she didn't wanna hurt herself cuz her brain wasn't there. Yeah, that's the prime example of that. Okay.

Yeah, very good point.

Your patients have their blood tested, their heart checked, their vision measured. So when was the last time anyone actually looked at their brain? Hippocampus Labs helps practices add qEEG brain mapping and neurofeedback as a complete new service line. Objective assessment, clinical protocols, professional reporting, expert practitioner included and available for consult. We build the program, Train your team and bring you the patients. You deliver the care. Turnkey from day 1. Hippocampus Labs. Visit hippocampuslabs.com to learn more.

So there's, there's more than one way you can utilize neurofeedback to impact and help with athletes. So one is obviously concussion recovery. We're talking about now in athlete wellness. Neurofeedback is a powerful tool where that individual had a concussion, whether it was mild or it was severe, there's going to be an inflammatory process that the brain has to go through, a healing process that they have to go through. But after they go through that, sometimes these people are still feeling they're having headaches on a regular basis. They're not able to sleep. Grades can be slipping. The mood of the individual can be changed quite a bit after a concussion. And, and that's after they've been released to play and say, you're recovered from your concussion, you're able to go back in the game, but they're still having these symptoms. So something is still not right. And a lot of players, both in youth sports, it really just goes under the radar. And in professional sports, they don't have an answer. And neurofeedback can be one of those things that provides an answer. And there are some, the high-level athletes that have gone through this, and it's just light and it's like night and day. They've got quotes and case studies out there and research out there that we'll share with you to show the amount of impact that with this neurofeedback can have. for concussion recovery and just improving the athlete wellness overall for symptom relief. And we say at the bottom of the slide there, especially impactful for youth athletes. And one of the reasons that is, is because we think about and we see all these things and studies have been done with professional athletes, but really it's, it's the youth athletes that want to support everyone. But youth athletes go under the radar and they, most of them, They never have access to neurofeedback because they don't have a practitioner that's local to them that's well-versed in this that can help them with this type of support. Professional athletes, they can afford anything, but they don't have that local practitioner that's around them that can, that can educate the parents and educate the teams to help them with this. And just as I've noticed that I'm in my mid-40s, I've noticed that recovery time from a physical activity and exercise takes a little bit longer. Unfortunately, I don't like to admit that. But it's the same thing with the brain. For the brain, as you age, it does take longer to recover from things when you become fatigued or you have a lack of sleep. You need more time to recover. For kids, we've heard those types of things where they bounce back really quickly. So for youth athletes that have issues, that they've had problems, whether it be concussion or other things, with neurofeedback, they can bounce back very quickly and have a major impact in a short period of time.

Yeah, I've had a lot of students that go to college and play sports, got concussions, their grades dropped, they dropped out of school. I mean, I can just— I had a lot of cases like that. And the way that post-concussion syndrome is a real thing, where the concussion symptoms last a long time, it's because the medical approach is let's do an MRI or CAT scan, which is a golden standard, and let's look at the slices of the brain. That's all they look for. It's not a fractured skull or a bleeder. They'll come back as normal. Neurofeedback and the brain mapping takes electronic slices of your brain and see, and we can see where the brain is misfiring. That's why we can go ahead and address the concussion, quote, scrub it out so it doesn't be a problem down the future. Is that, that's the reason why neurofeedback is powerful that way.

Yeah, great point. So for performance optimization and future of training, we see this with the trend of professional and high-level athletes adopting this and entire teams. across the world adopting this, as using this to elevate their team's performance, the entire team, to help make sure that they're more focused, they have more emotional control, reaction speed, which they're all measuring. And it's— it is the gym for the brain. You're working out the brain to make it stronger, more adaptable, more resilient, creating more neuroplasticity so that they can learn new techniques and new processes faster, handle things at a greater level of pressure. So performance optimization and the amount of money that's being spent now in youth sports for trying to get their athlete college scholarship or even NIL money now that most of you are aware of, the just having that one thing that puts them above all the others and giving them a mental edge is going to give them the best opportunity to be able to achieve their, their own personal best and be able to have opportunities to be able to excel further than their classmates or, or other schools that are not utilizing this, or other teams that are not utilizing this. So this is a major thing that can actually elevate an entire team if you're working with an entire team. But you can definitely want to have those individuals that you're, you're helping move to the next level. And it aligns with modern science this day and age. Obviously, we're all aware of, we want more data The more data we have, then the more powerful you are as a practitioner and as a sports coach or an organization. If you have data that you can make meaningful decisions with, and that's where Hippocampus Labs comes in, the data that we get from utilizing qEEG brain mapping, which Dr. Kevin's going to get into, and neurofeedback, we have the opportunity to make major changes in these youth athletes and semi-pro college athletes and professionals alike with science-driven sports innovation. Okay.

So here, what we do as far as the brain map, I mean, we put a, a cap on your head and we actually, with all the data from the 19 sensors, we get, we get a 3D model of your brain with 6,800 voxels, which is a volumetric electrical data box. And we compare that box of information with somebody Who's your— their age and their gender and their left or right-handedness. So we can see what a normal brain looks like. And we know what brain we're looking at if they're struggling in either the frequencies or the networks. We know where the struggle is and we can target that area. It's so much information. We get like 280 pages of reports, but it identifies where the brain struggles and identifies where the brain can improve. On the, on the field and off the field. Each brainwave tells a specific performance story. Like, the neurofeedback providers like we at Hippocampus Lab read every page of that report, and it's kind of like a coach reading a game film, identifying patterns and predict and explain performance outcomes. We can address everything as far as the, the beta frequency. If it's too high, that leads to performance anxiety. If you got the theta frequency bursting in there, You get lapses in focus and cognitive fatigue. Alpha suppression, overfocused and rigid. You need alpha frequency actually higher than the normal brain should be to make it, to clear out all the static in the brain and focus better. And the asymmetries are also important. You can catch those on the brain map. If the left or right imbalances, that means your brain is not firing on all cylinders correctly. It means the timing is off. And we can see all that with QEEG brain map. You can't see that with MRI or CAT scan or anything else like that. You can't see it if you just look at somebody to know if they've got their game going, whether a game is on. Okay, what EEG neurofeedback actually does— this isn't the brain map part. The brain map tells us where to go, where to— it targets the areas of the brain that need work. So the neurofeedback, it actually is the sound that you hear when you're putting your— the sensors on the head and the headphones on. We train your brain to get in its optimal performance state and level. And again, we identify it through the brain map. You do the brain training sessions to get them either before an event, before a sporting event or a youth event. We get the brain firing on all cylinders. Elite athletes don't just train harder, they think more efficiently. So neuroimaging shows us who the high performers are. They use less of— less energy in their brain. It learns to do more with less. This phenomenon is called cortical efficiency. It's trainable with neurofeedback, and neurofeedback promotes faster neural activation, and there's a lot of studies out there that show that.

So just on that note, everyone here, and if you're listening to a recording, and if you joined late, we are going to provide a document that actually has an outline, 77 different research studies that have all been done on athletes and the effects. So you'll have that, the PubMed articles that you can go through and scour and read into, that the amount of data that's available just specifically with athletes and athletes from different sports, that will give you a lot of confidence to be able to work with your patients and work with sports teams that are in your local area or in weekend warriors that just want to just push themselves to the next level, this noradrenaline feedback can really have a big impact, and we have the research behind it. So this Tobias from the Sixers— this is Tobias Harris. I'm a Sixers fan, I'm from the Philly area, so we had to find a Sixers player to put on here. But quote from him is, I've got to be able to function the next day at the top level. And he was referring to the 82-game season schedule and the rigorous nature of them having to travel so much, sleep and recovery is obviously essential. So he used neurofeedback and it really just helped him maintain that, that peak performance that he needed to be able to sleep better, to recover, and to really have the impact that he was when he was as, as a professional player. So there's no one-size-fits-all brain protocols that we work with, with Hippocampus Labs. It, like Dr. Kevin mentioned, is like we go over over 280 pages of And we look at what is the specific thing that we're going to do with that individual player. But outside of that, so we're looking at if there's damage, if there's hyper or there's hypoactivity from a brainwave perspective. But if we want to get into a specific protocol, we have the ability to also focus in on what's been researched to show of like precision sports. So alpha and SMR regulation is as far as like central brain to help with composure, rhythm, motor consistency under high stakes. If we want somebody, if they're in a type of sport that they have to be more explosive and reactive, that sensor motor beta modulation for faster reaction, like a race car driver, that's what we can focus on to make sure that they are able to be at their, at the highest level possible. Endurance training for the individuals that are going to have to sustain for long terms, and they have to have that mental resilience to have that output over long durations, we can work with midline theta training. To autonomic regulation. For combat sports, if we want some combat sports and MMA, I'm sure some of you may have seen they get explosive, they may overreact, and that's kind of like the showbiz part of it. But essentially a lot of them have— they, they do that on purpose because of their getting their fans engaged. But they do have to have that emotional regulation to be able to keep themselves composed under extreme stress when they're in combat sports, MMA. So the human dimension, this is something that it's like psychosocial skills. It's beyond brainwaves. We're building better competitors. The 4 areas that you see here, this is— Neurofeedback is not just sharpening reflexes. It helps to reshape the psychological scaffolding of a high performer. So the 4 things, like say working with another company with some of the most elite, and I've been so blessed to work with some of the most elite talent identification professionals in the world. And they're identifying these 4 things as essential, like critical to be a professional athlete. And if they don't have all these 4 things that they're working on and at their highest level, then they may become a professional athlete because of their physical skill, but they're going to— it's going to be like they're going to stay at the top for a cup of coffee. And they fizzle out. They've got to have all of these things at the highest level to be able to become a professional athlete and maintain that professional performance. So neurofeedback helps support individuals with neuroplasticity and how it supports that to help an individual become more coachable. If you're working with a youth athlete as you're doing neurofeedback, that's going to increase their ability to actually be more coachable because they're able to learn faster. Failure recovery, they're able to actually have better stress resilience, their stress response, so they can actually overcome losses or overcome in a game when they may have lost a couple of times to an opponent and they need to recover faster and they got to get their head back in the game. Neurofeedback is going to help them have that resilience to be able to come back and be able to perform at their elite level and just remove that past performance from their mind. So they got to have that leadership, got to have that focus, got to have that sustainable competitiveness. And neurofeedback can help provide that to athletes to be at their highest level. When you train the brain in the lab, as an athlete who shows up in the locker room, they're in the huddle, they're in a comeback, they're, they're individuals. We're not just obviously dealing with a statistic here, we're dealing with a human being, and we're able to help them really be at their best. So giving them an edge is really powerful that you can all have. So it's providing that support as, as practitioners As Hippocampus Labs, we're focusing on the highest level protocols that we can provide you that will give you the best results. So you don't have to go back to school. You don't have to be questioning, is this the right direction to be able to support this athlete? I really want to make sure they get the results. And we really genuinely, that's what we're doing is we, we understand who we're dealing with. We're dealing with humans on the other end. We want to make sure that they get the best results possible. Yeah. Benefits for athletes. We've talked about this a little bit. It just amplifies it. Sharper execution under pressure. Consistent focus and rhythm, shorter recovery windows, lower injury risk.

All of it.

Like, we are— with neurofeedback, you're able to take the individual and take them to the next level. They were— they're able to work on their physical performance. You're able to, as a practitioner, working on the mental performance and helping them be the best athlete they can be.

That's it for today's episode. Thank you for listening to this special presentation from The Factor Podcast Network featuring our partners at the Better Brains, Better Futures podcast. We hope you enjoyed part 1 of this conversation with Dr. Kevin Butterfield and host Seth Kalin. If you'd like to revisit Dr. Kevin's earlier appearances on The Factor Podcast, be sure to check out episodes 115 and 116 Where we explored the foundations of neurofeedback and its broader clinical applications. In our next episode, we'll shift from the foundational science into real-world implementation, looking at how elite athletes, sports organizations, and healthcare providers are using brain mapping and neurofeedback to optimize performance and support concussion recovery. Part 2 drops in 2 weeks. You won't want to miss it. Be sure to check out our show notes to learn more about neurofeedback technology and how you can implement it in your patient care. And as always, if you enjoyed today's content, be sure to leave us a review, subscribe, and share this episode with a friend. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. Hey guys, if you like what you heard today, I encourage you to visit our website at factor-story.com. That's spelled F-A-K-T-R hyphen store dot com to find out more information about all that we have to offer. We have a variety of online offerings as well as our hands-on Factor Rehab System course scheduled in cities around the globe. Be sure to also check out our event calendar and bookmark any of these upcoming live webinar dates coming up in the near future so you can join us live. And of course, the biggest compliment we can receive. is for you to help us spread the word to your friends, colleagues, and classmates. You'll find all the important links as well as info about our sponsors in the show notes, so be sure to check those out.