 Thank you, Ashley, thank you very much and thanks to Lydia because we've had a very, very wonderful time collaborating with Lydia and collaborating with the strong program at the University of Cincinnati. Without Josh Hagen's help, Greg's help, Regina's help, we would not have the data to present to you today. This will be my 41st year as a physical therapist from University of Pittsburgh. My 40, 50 years an athletic trainer and my 51st football season. And over the years I have looked for techniques, modalities, tools to help us with recovery, to help us with performance. And in athletics we have a favorite saying, it's 50% art, 50% science. In the position I hold my function is to try to get the art some scientific background. And in the last nine months I've probably been more excited than ever looking at injury mitigation, looking at the state of sports science and different evaluation tools, but more importantly, the mental wellness of my 425 student athletes. Because I don't think you can open a USA Today, an ESPN.com or whatever without finding about the stresses within college athletics today and the fact that we're merging a student athlete with both athletics and student functions and the anxiety that comes with that. Laura already talked about all these different dashboards and that's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for the dashboard that tells me my student athlete is ready to go to class, ready to go play, and ready to be recovered. And they're living a complete athletic life and a student life as well. Just to set this up I want to show a little bit about what we do to our student athletes. I came to me about four years ago, we're sitting around on a Saturday afternoon at the University of Cincinnati, we have an annual meeting on sports science and Josh came over in the afternoon meeting and said, you know, Bob, I'm with the strong program and I've got a little problem. And I said, what's that? He said, well, I don't have any females who've passed Navy Seals training and I need some females. And I said, well, I'll make you a deal. I'll give you my female soccer team if I can also study my football team. And he said, you've got a deal. So in the last four years we've collected so much data on these two sports and now we've encompassed our men's soccer team as well as we're starting to get our basketball team involved. But we put our athletes for women's soccer through a variety of tests in which we look at the impact on the performance but also the mental health impact. We're collecting so much data on these girls from MVO2s, the functional data. But the most important thing I'm looking for is recovery. Recovery. Because I can't say to ESPN, no, we're not going to play tonight. We're going to take the night off because my kids aren't recovered. Or I'm not going to be able to call the NCAA and say, hey, my women's soccer team's not ready for the first round of the NCAA tournament, by the way. We want to move it back in day or two. You either show up and play or you don't get invited. So the bottom line is I have to be able to get them recovered. And you look at all these traditional recovery modalities and we have some issues out there. So my girls have to do MVO2 tests. They do a yo-yo test. We look at Bod Pod. We look at a system called PEDAR and I love biomarkers. I'm an old-time researcher, so I love biomarkers. Because if I take your biomarkers, your blood work, then your subjective needs to match that blood work. Your objective values with different other parameters need to match that blood work. And of course, heart rate variability you've heard now for two days. I love the presentation yesterday afternoon where he was discussing heart rate variability. And this is a tool I wish I could put on all 425 of my athletes. We look at a variety of training interventions. I push our athletes. It's my job is to help our strength coaches push the athletes to mitigate the injury and to get them prepared and ready to play. We train both aerobically and we train aerobically on a almost daily basis. So right now I'm in the mineral football camp. And I've got kids who are out there who wake up at 6.30 in the morning and they get to bed at 10 o'clock at night. So we're going all day long. And we need to get the kids recovered for the next day. Like Lydia said, I can't walk into my coaches and say, by the way, I'm giving my quarterback off today. I'm giving my running back off today. You have to be able to help these young people recover. So we're developing a profile on each individual athlete that allows our athletes' physiological parameters to really control the training load and then control recovery because recovery is an essence. Every time we train, we have what we call fluid training. Each of my girls train with a heart rate monitor on. And we decide what their loads are, what their heart rates are, and we can either speed them up because they're not hitting their target load or we can slow them down because they overload. And trust me, there is a wide range. It's kind of like the 80-20 principle. Okay, I've got 80% of my athletes that are right in my targets and I got 10% who can't train hard enough and 10% who you've got to slow them down. So that you've got to be able to monitor this and actually now in football, we have 38 of our players wearing this system during practice. And I can walk over and say, we need to get them more fluids. We need to slow down their volume. We need to do this because my job is the health and safety of all 425 of my athletes. We get loads every day on our girls. So every time the girls train, we get what we call a physiological load, which is a number that comes out of the Zephyr system that they train at 85% or greater, they start looking at their physiological load. I probably have the only soccer coach in America that we could walk up to at halftime and say, we need to change recovery. And he says, okay, let's go ahead and do this, this, and this. Or in the middle of the game, Sammy can walk over and tap him and say, so and so is getting way up there with their loads. We need to back her out of the game and give her a little bit of a rest. Because we need to be fluid because every athlete is different and every athlete's stress is different. What happens if my number one mid center decides that they have to take their final today and then that night we have to play a game like we did the other night against Indiana University. By the way, we beat them 3-1. But what happens if she has a final that day or a midterm that day? And all of a sudden she's got other stresses besides the thought of playing. And so we look at these training loads and I have to figure out how to recover them. So I look at their training loads and then I start looking at biomarkers. And why did I start using biomarkers? Because you can hear all this stuff about GPS. We're GPS and our whole team and it's telling them how many miles they went or how much they did here, how much they did there. And we weren't excited about it. So we haven't really bought back into the whole GPS system because the biomarkers we were getting weren't necessarily matching the workloads that the kids were doing. Because some kids can over train, some kids can under train. I look real simple when we do our biomarkers. We looked at the creatin level, LDH level, the myoglobin, CK that Laura already talked about. And then we constantly are doing urine dipsticks, looking for overtraining. Because that's the signal in which their parasympathetic system is going to have to kick in to try to get recovery going. And then if you over train them, their CNS levels start to drop. So this is an example of all the data we have. This is one of my athletes. That's just one athlete over the course of the 15 and 16 season. And we constantly look at these biomarkers and about a year ago we started playing more and more with cortisol. Because now we know that the cortisol gives us that information on what's going on within their brain and their CNS system. So the fact that if they have high cortisol, because they're having problems with social issues. Social media and athletics, wow, that creates stress, okay? Relationships in college. How many in here you went to college and you had a boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever? And the bottom line is that creates stress. And on top of that I'm going to give you a coach. He's pretty intense. Who's going to get in your face if you're not playing well. That's stress. More importantly, a lot of these young kids come to college and never have lifted hard a day in their life. And then all of a sudden their very first day on campus, they go to the weight room. And they got a strength coach that kind of looks a heck of a lot worse than me in terms of big and strong and heavy. And then they throw the weights on them and these kids are not used to that stress. So there are a large amount of stresses and in this particular individual you can see where she kind of fluctuates and we do our damnedest to take the same measurement every time, every day we do the test. Because cortisol is fluctuating. Here's another one of my kids who absolutely, you can see their cortisol levels down here. You can see she doesn't get overly stressed by anything. This is one of my defenders. And she's a great defender because she doesn't get upset, okay? If there's a mistake on the field, she corrects a mistake, goes out and keeps on playing. Other kids aren't like that. So we really want to use technology, sensor technology. And the one I like right now is the Omega Wave system that Laura, Lydia just talked about. And design recovery based on their heart rate variability and their CNS scores. So that when we look at athletics in college today, the numbers are startling. 17% of my athletes are clinically depressed. 17% and it pretty much matches the number of kids who currently have in counseling services. About 17%. 6% are so clinically depressed that they're willing to do harm to themselves. And these numbers come right out of the NCA numbers. They're not my numbers at my specific school, but they're generic numbers. And sure enough on an annual basis, I'm faced with four or five kids who decide that the stress of college sports is too much for them. We broke our record. We had a girl show up for freshman, one of our sports. Six weeks later she walks into my office and says, I quit. I can't handle it. You're gonna pass her scholarship up, you quit. Yes, it's not what I thought it was. If you look at the current NCA numbers, 10.7% of college students who signed a division one college scholarship after a year wish they had never done it. 10.7%. Secondary to all these stresses. Coaching, time commitments, academics, practice, game schedules, weight room, especially my freshman class. 79% of college athletes complain of anxiety. 37% complain of some level of depression. And 17% are clinically depressed. So my role was to find modalities that would help with this. We do a base two test, an adult base two test on all of our student athletes when they come in from a psychological profile standpoint. You can pick up the paper about every month to two months and read about a college student athlete who's committed suicide secondary to the strains of the college life or personal family life or some social life. So that my job is to reduce that potential. And that's why the number one biomarker I like is cortisol. So when I looked at traditional recovery methods, you see all the time in the paper, the norm of texts, the cold tubs, okay? They're foam rollers. I needed something that gave me an immediate kickback, something that immediately got the kid back to where I needed him. And that's where Josh was kind enough to let us have one of the floats out of the strong program. And trust me, I was the first one in it, okay? First one in it, I loved it, okay? I was in it for an hour and 10 minutes. My staff had to finally drag me out because they couldn't wake me up, okay? Loved it. And of course, you know, the float-restricted environmental simulation techniques in which we're trying to get some level of control of their life. They're trying to desensitize. They're trying to relax. And the data is pretty well good out there in terms of glycogen article, float therapy, stimuli-reducing stress, all the things we heard about yesterday. Very, very typical in the average population where float therapy reduced pain, stress, things that Lydia just talked about. But I needed something specific to my kids. So we looked at the float. We had them float pre and post omega wave. We had them fill out their subjective score that we got from the military. And what we saw was significant improvement. If you look over at this line right here, there's significant improvement in tension after one hour of float. So that the amount of CNS tension that these kids perceived significantly reduced with the float. So we said, okay, and we looked at another possible factor. How else can I do this? So besides getting this, this is all based on heart rate variability in omega wave. I wanted something more objective. I wanted a biomarker. So Regina Shea, who is, I call her the cortisol queen for the military. We all had a big discussion on the phone one day and we designed a protocol in which we looked at cortisol. And she's the one that picked up an effect I'm about ready to show you. So these are three of my student athlete soccer players in which looking at their cortisol data over the course of one season, this is who I call my stress-free kid. She's the one who can play 90 minutes a day. She recovers on her own. She can get up the next morning. She's ready to play another 90 minutes, okay? This one is kind of my average in which she goes from highs to lows to highs. And she has some stress affects her. So if all of a sudden she has a big test, stress goes up. We have a big game, stress goes up. And then I have one right here who's high stress. No matter, she lives her life on the edge. She's always stressed no matter what. But notice one thing, and Regina was one of the first ones to pick this up. On October 17th of 2016 across the board was a high stress week. And we went back and looked at our games. And what we found was it can't be the games. We won one, we tied one. Nobody yelled at each other. Nobody got hostile, no fight, nothing like that. What went on that week? Well, it turned out to be midterms. So all of a sudden we saw this academic stress because my soccer coach, I love him to death. He's a great guy, allows us to do a lot of research on his girls. But he has a role. If you don't have a 3.5 GPA, you can be suspended. So when we get the midterms, the girls really focus in. Because we went back and looked at this on my men's football team and my men's soccer team. And guess what? No increase in cortisol, okay? So midterms had zero effect on my players, okay? Only my girls. So we said, okay, well, how can we help them through this period of time where they're gonna be high stress? We came back in the spring and Sammy, my athletic trainer for the women's soccer team identified when the main test was for midterms for the girls. And we took their cortisol, pre and post float, and lo and behold, our data is pretty good at 0.013. 0.013 statistical average, so that, or percent. So we know the float created an environment based on cortisol that reduced the cortisol, reduced their anxiety, and subjectively they felt much more comfortable. A one hour float, every one of these is, so far we've done only one hour float period of time. We're now in the middle of a project where we're doing 30 minutes. And the reason being quite honestly is it's a practical reason. I have one float and I have 100 some kids within the project and we just don't have enough time. So we started trying 30 minutes. I'm not happy with my results to date. So my other option is to see if I can beg for another float tank. The use of float in the clinically depressed student athletes, so we're gonna have three different case studies or case projects that we're working on right now. So I'm taking some clinically depressed kids who are seeing my team psychologist and we put them into the float and we're looking at their CNS values on Omega wave. And lo and behold, what do we see it? It decreased by 20.7 after one float session. And this is a young lady who's very dear to me and I talk to her all the time and she does have some anxiety issues, but she loves it now. She'll come in and say, bad week, bad this, high stress from class, high stress from that, can I float? Absolutely. Let's get in the tank, let's get you ready. She's one of my track and field athletes. She's really good, so she's really good to get what she wants, okay? So, you know, anxiety, anxiety is a key, okay? Well, how about project two, use of the float with physical and mental post-workout recovery? The goal was to apply the float concept to student athletes to look at the physiological and CNS tolls, pre-game enhancement. So in essence, I've got an athlete who we pre and post workout. So what the kids were doing was they were coming in, getting monitored in the morning and then practicing and then going post practice into the float. And again, the scores and the CNS boost and sympathetic tension reduction was significant. So we now have, this is the largest population we have within studies right now. This is one of my colder projects I did during spring ball. Because I got a problem during spring ball, we've got to go out there at six in the morning, we have a practice on the field at eight, then the next morning they have to be ready to go again. And if I had my way right now, I would have 10 float tanks in camp if I could afford it. But what we did is we looked at about five student athletes, this is just a sample of one in which pre-practice, we did omega waves and cortisol, or immediately post practice, I'm sorry. So immediately, this is their pre-practice levels, immediately post-practice pre-float cortisol level, tension level, look at the tension index, very high, needed a sympathetic recovery, post-float cortisol levels and back to all greens across the board. So immediately after practice, they're all yellows, which is very consistent, high parasympathetic, low CNS scores, we floated for one hour, we took all the other modalities away, we took the foam rollers away, we took the Normatex away, we took the cold tub away, and we said, here's what I want you to do, I want you to just go eat, start drinking recovery, get back here in an hour, let's get in the float tank, get your pre-float measurement and your post-float. So the float as a single modality or single tool was able to get five of them ready. This is what I get every day out of the Department of Defense. So then every morning, my girls wake up and they put their omega waves on, and within 30 minutes, we have, this is a pre-game day in which we're gonna have one of our pre-, spring soccer games, and you can see that we're looking at parasympathetic, sympathetic tension in CNS. This is everything Lydia just talked about. So I got two kids down here that need sympathetic recovery and CNS recovery, and these two are starters, okay? So what do you think they did the day of the game? They floated, and they both played very, very effectively for me. And I said, well, maybe that's just them, not really, whatever. So I took two of my men's basketball players, and in the spring, we were getting ready for a conference tournament, I floated both of the kids, and for the first game of the tournament, they had probably one of their best games of the year. So unfortunately, I couldn't take the float with me to, where'd we play? We played in Memphis. I wish I could have had one in the hotel. I would have floated all my high-minute kids. So we're now fluid in our recovery. We're now able to use these sensor tools to decide, and the one I look for is I'm looking at tension, very high tensions, they automatically float, or I look at CNS recovery, and they automatically float. So what we started to do in the spring was we would say, okay, we're gonna play on Saturday. When we start collecting our Wednesday Omega wave scores, the kids that are in that high tension area have to start to float until all their moons come back into play. And then they can be ready to go by Saturday. And we went four, one, and one in the spring. So we're pretty happy with the results. This is a algorithm for recovery in which float has basically able to control all of these low CNS, high parasympathetic, high-sympathetic, low-sympathetic, like Lydia just talked about. So my trainers have this. They use it as part of their protocol. We just added tart cherry juice for one of our new recoveries, meditation, our kids in football and women's soccer do yoga once a week so that we're looking at every modality possible that we can get in to help the kids recover. So I have to deal with recovery, pregame assessment and pregame changes to get them ready. And then I'm also looking at my favorite population, which are my young people struggling with some sort of mental health capability to continue down the college athletic path. So I wanna use recovery methods to recharge the muster of the skeletal nervous system to optimize performance. So my job is the health and safety of my student athletes. I'd like to thank Ben, I'd like to thank Ashken and certainly Josh, Gray and Regina for all their help on this project. I can say in January I knew about this much about float and at this point in the ball game, like I said, if I had an opportunity to put floats in all my facilities, I would because we're finding it as a very, very successful tool. So again, thank you very much for allowing me to come and present today. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.