I just got off the phone with a young woman (13 years old) and her mother. The young woman, let’s call her Angie, has been suffering from trich for a couple years but seeing great improvements with amino acid therapy. In the course of our conversation, I found out that Angie just made the JV high school softball team as a freshman, which is a rare accomplishment at her high school, as girls softball is a very competitive sport.
This reminded me of several other student-athletes that I’ve worked with over the years that had trich. Ironically, many of them have been softball players, and most of them played either short-stop or catcher. Of the softball players we’ve worked with for trich, all of them found a dramatic improvement in their ability to track and hit the ball once they started on amino acid therapy. One teenaged girl in particular noted that her batting average improved by 0.250 (she was now batting over 0.440),she was no longer scared by inside pitches and that she was fielding the ball much easier.
This makes sense if I think about the overall effects of properly balanced amino acid therapy. By improving neurotransmitter function, the brain can more easily send signals throughout the body. Not only will this decrease or eliminate symptoms associated with neurotransmitter imbalance, it should improve fine motor skills and hand/eye or foot/eye coordination, which should improve athletic performance.
While these make sense in theory, I have yet to see any studies documenting this effect. However, we have started a couple small scale studies with athletes to determine if and how nutritional changes, including amino acid therapy, can alter athletic performance. One of those athletes is me, so I’ll be sure to keep you updated on this blog as the studies progress.
