#7 BEAUTIFUL BRAINS PROJECT: Kim Couper

#Kim’s beautiful profile: "WHERE ATHLETES GAIN THE EDGE ON THE COMPETITION"

Number 7 of the ‪#‎beautifulbrains:‬ I got to hang out with coach Kim Couper.

Kim has a list of skating qualifications so long as a Canadian winter lol. She has more than 23 years of skating experience and has been a skating Instructor for 19 years. She is a Guest Instructor world-wide, given her NHL experience.

Not only that, but she is also an amazing horse-rider with her horse Mary, aka Fashionably Late. And the barn manager at Unicorn Stable, where my daughter rides.

With Kim we got to do something different: I wanted to show her psycho-physiological measurements, which I find are very uselful for athletes!.

So we got to do a full "stress assessment" and to speak about the effects of mental stress on the body, how to be mindful and how to be the drivers of your own Ferrari (metaphor lol).

Check coach Kim's website

1. FOCUS, RESILIENCE, COMPETITIVE EDGE :

Where does it get measured: the body responses get measured with a sensor for breathing, two for muscle activity, one for heart rate, one for skin conductivity and one for temperature..

This assessment is completely different from the previous ones. It consists of a 20 minutes recording, with 10 different activities.

The activities are: baseline with eyes open, with eyes closed, a reading task, first rest, a math task, second rest, a cognitive task, third rest, a focus training and a breathing training. All gets measured as the person undergoes these activities.

Coach Kim is an athletes, and her physical conditions are really good. She has excellent muscle tone, her muscle at rest are nice and relaxed, her breathing is slightly fast and shallow (19 Br/M), her heart rate is around 58 (without much variability though).

All along those 20 minutes, she mantained focus and composure.

Her muscles were relaxed, almost until the end when she got tense doing the focus exercise. Kim is a highly competitive individual so she took the task very seriously.

When she did her breathing exercise, her Heart Rate Variability increased (Yey!), even if she forgot to relax the shoulder that she had tensed in the previous exercise.

This gave us the chance to talk about mindfulness and the opportunity to make visible on a screen what normally isn't visible and getting to gather awareness.

Awareness is the key to being present, focused and calm.

Mindfulness is one of my passions and I love to use this type of technology to make to idea clearer. I call it technology-based mindfulness!

Here is the screen of the recording Kim and I made.

A 20 minutes task where we go through tasks and we measure psychophysiological changes! Exciting!

Check coach Kim's website

#beautifulbrains