Peak performance starts in the mind
By Pat Hickey

If there is one point that is being amplified by the Dubin Inquiry, it was the fact that athletes are forever seeking an edge, that something extra that spells the difference between being an also-ran and a medallist.

In that search for something extra, a couple of Montrealer's feel they have invented a better mousetrap and the world is starting to beat a path to their door.

Retired army major Norrie Laderoute and Lawrence Klein are involved with Thought Technology Ltd., a Montreal company which is marketing a program called Mind Over Muscle. It combines old-fashioned meditation with space-age biofeedback technology.

The program has been used and employed by a wide range of athletes, coaches and sports medallists Sylvie Bernier and Carolyn Waldo; champion marksman Steve Tibbets and former national basketball team coach Jack Donohue.

Klein and Laderoute stumbled on the concept when they began studying the practical application of a gadget called the GSR, a biofeedback device which measures changes brought about by stress and its earliest use was in the treatment of phobias.

Both men had backgrounds in sport and coaching. Klein was a veteran ski instructor while Laderoute was the athletic director of the Canadian Armed Forces Combat Training Center and was involved in training competitors for shooting, biathlon and military modern pentathlon.

Experiment was too successful
"We started applying techniques for relaxation and visualization to some of the athletes I was training for the biathlon," said Laderoute. "The problem was that the experiment backfired at the beginning because we wanted it to be as scientific as possible and we set up control groups. The groups that used these techniques showed an almost immediate improvement and we had a problem because the other competitors wanted to use the techniques as well."

The basic concept behind the program is a simple one. An athlete is taught how to relax, how to visualize the skills needed in his particular sport and how to find the fine line between fear and excitement.

"Every person is different and every sport is different," noted Laderoute. "There's no one proper response to fear of stress but

    it's important that every athlete learn how to deal with stress and find the level which enables him to perform at his best."

The program is finding wide acceptance at a time when sports psychology is becoming an increasingly more important part of the competitive scene. All of Canada's national teams have psychological conditioning as part of their programs and many of the psychologists involved have endorsed the GSR program.

And, says Klein, the program has a built-in plus in an era when athletes are looked on with suspicion in the wake of the Ben Johnson steroid scandal.

Built-in message
"There's a built-in anti-drug message in all of our programs," noted Klein. "What we're trying to do is convince the athletes that they can make a greater improvement by harnessing all the resources they have available to them.

Cal Botterill, a noted sports psychologist from the University of Winnipeg, is enthusiastic about the program, which is in widespread use in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Japan.

Botterill, who has worked with Canada's national swimming and basketball teams, says he's amazed when he hears that athletes are risking their health by using steroids in hopes they can produce an improvement of five to six percent. Proper mental conditioning, says Botterill, can result in an improvement in the 20-to-30 percent range.

Jack Donohue adds that the most useless cliche in sports is the locker-room poster urging athletes to give "110 percent."

"I'm an old math teacher," notes Donohue, "and I know it doesn't add up. But I also know that there are a lot of people coasting on 20 to 30 percent of their abilities and they should be aiming to get as close as possible to 100 percent and that includes the mental as well as the physical."

Anyone who doubts the importance of mental training should have listened to American tennis player Craig Campbell after he lost 7-6, 6-1 to Canadian champion Andrew Sznajder in yesterday's semifinals of the Canadian Airlines satellite tournament.

"I just don't have the fire," said Campbell, who was two points away from winning the first set when he held a 5-2 lead in the first-set tiebreaker. "I think I can play the game well but it's just not that important to me."

As Lawrence Klein might say: "Have I got a program for you."