The researchers Ali-Mohammad Kamali, Mohammad Nami, Seyedeh-Saeedeh Yahyavi, Zahra Kheradmand Saadi, and Alireza Mohammadi published the study titled “Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation to Assist Experienced Pistol Shooters in Achieving Better Performance Scores” in the journal “The Cerebellum” in 2018. The research, which may seem like something out of a movie experiment, might surprise you.
Recently, brain stimulation has emerged as a promising method for enhancing athletes’ performance. In this study, 16 pistol shooters were recruited and randomly divided into two groups: a control group receiving no intervention and an experimental group receiving either sham or real transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). In the experimental group, anodal stimulation was applied over the cerebellar region, while cathodal suppression was applied over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC); the control group received no such treatment. The researchers assessed their performance using various metrics, including shooting scores, shooting latency, errors, and task completion times in dynamic tremor and mirror-tracing tasks.
The results revealed that tDCS, as opposed to sham stimulation, led to a significant improvement of 2.3% ± 0.65 in the average shooting scores for pistol shooters (mean ± SEM, p = 0.018). Additionally, a significantly shorter bullet hole distance from the center of the Air Pistol Target was observed in the tDCS experimental group (p = 0.02). In contrast, in the control group, no notable differences were observed in the shooting scores of shooters across two consecutive sessions.
Regarding latency to shooting, no significant differences were noted within groups between both sessions. However, when it came to the dynamic tremor task outcome, there were significantly fewer errors after real tDCS compared to sham stimulation. Furthermore, the results of the mirror-tracing task in the tDCS group showed significant differences between the sham and real tDCS sessions, favoring the real-tDCS session (p = 0.001).
In conclusion, the concurrent suppression of the dlPFC and stimulation of the cerebellum through tDCS appear to have the potential to elevate shooting scores among experienced pistol shooters.
Kamali, A.-M., Nami, M., Yahyavi, S.-S., Saadi, Z. K., & Mohammadi, A. (2018). Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation to Assist Experienced Pistol Shooters in Gaining Even-Better Performance Scores. The Cerebellum. doi:10.1007/s12311-018-0967-9
