When Halo Neuroscience designed the Halo Sport headset, it was evident that its use extended into various sports. The device is designed to stimulate a special part of the brain called the motor cortex and help any type of athlete get the most out of their brain — and their workout. There has already been documented use from NFL players, the Golden State Warriors and Olympians.
Now Halo is announcing a new partnership with the San Francisco Giants, who have implemented Halo Sport as part of the team’s core training regimen to improve player performance.
“The Giants are our neighbors, and we’ve become pretty close over the last year,” said Halo Neuroscience CEO Dr. Daniel Chao, whose company is based in San Francisco.
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As Chao said, the formal announcement of the partnership hardly means that these two organizations just met. In January 2016, the Giants and Halo started working together at the team’s conditioning camp in Phoenix. The invitation-only extended to the organization’s top prospects. Players were split into two groups — one made use of Halo Sport and the other did not.
“It was a perfect proving ground for us,” Chao said. “We did before-and-after testing and the group that used Halo Sport got results that we would expect. That was enough to lead to a one-page summary that got circulated up the chain to the front office appealing for budget.”
The metric keyed in on most was the 20-yard dash. They were looking for an improvement in short burst speed — something that would show up in stealing bases and chasing down fly balls or grounders. After two weeks, almost all the players in the group that did 20-minute neuropriming sessions with the Halo Sport headset prior to their workouts showed “significant” improvement while the control group only demonstrated moderate improvement.
A similar study of MLB players training with Sparta Science recently produced results as well for players who neuroprimed, and New York Mets outfielder Yoenis Cespedes is among the players who have used Halo Sport.
“There’s nothing like data to win a sale,” Chao said when asked what ultimately attracted the Giants to Halo. “That’s what we want to be known for; let’s point to numbers, numbers sell themselves.”
“Since I’ve been using Halo Sport, it really has taken my game to the next level,” Giants top pitching prospect Tyler Beede said in a video released by Halo Neuroscience. “When you use it over the course of a season, over the course of the day-in, day-out activities that you’re doing, your brain just becomes so in tune with what you’ve been doing that it can memorize and it can enter your movements that take you to that next level.”
Beede earlier this month did tell What Pros Wear, “Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t, but a high-percent chance that it does give us a little bit of an edge.” He said wearing Halo Sport feels like “little ants crawling on your head.”
Halo Neuroscience’s partnership with the Giants will be a rather broad deployment. Chao says that there will be Halo Sport stations at all the Giants’ various training facilities — not just limited to the ones in San Francisco and Scottsdale, Ariz.
Even though a 162-game schedule doesn’t leave much time for practice, there are still a couple areas where Chao sees Halo Sport being beneficial to the big league club.
“If you think about a position player, what they have to do during the game is play nine innings, but most of them show up early to take batting practice,” Chao said. “Even in the on-deck circle, for example, they are taking practice cuts. All of that added up is probably a hundred swings per day. What can we do to make those swings more meaningful? Pairing that with Halo Sport is one way you can do that.”
Who knows? Maybe Halo Sport can be a driving force in helping the Giants win their fourth World Series title in eight seasons.
“We are extremely excited to integrate Halo’s neurostimulation technology into our core training regimen to improve and refine on-field player performance and athleticism,” Giants head athletic trainer Dave Groeschner said in a statement. “After testing the product internally, we’ve determined that incorporating Halo Sport ‘Neuropriming’ into our training programs produces measurable and significant results.”