Hello everyone — this is Dr. Gordon Jones, your Brain Fitness and Pickleball Performance Coach.
This week, I want you to do something different.
This isn’t a true pickleball performance session, but instead a fantastic announcement we are making today.
Instead of just hearing or reading it here on Substack, I want you to experience it with the brainwave entrainment process.
Today I’m going to tell you about something we’ve been building behind the scenes.
So get comfortable.
Sit or lie down somewhere you won’t be disturbed for the next few minutes. And put on your headphones if you have them.
You don’t have to do anything. Just let me guide you as I have in the past dozen sessions.
We have a new partnership. A big one. One I believe is a real step forward for how pickleball players train.
I’ll share exactly who, and exactly what it means for your game, in just a few minutes.
But first — I want you to understand why it matters. And the best way to understand it… is to let your own brain show you.
Let’s start with your breath as we always do.
Breathe in slowly through your nose… 1,2,3,4
Hold for 1,2,3,4,5,6
And let it go… 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8
And hold for 1,2
Again, in slowly… 1,2,3,4
Hold for 1,2,3,4,5,6
And let it go… 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8
And hold for 1,2
Good.
Now, just let the breath do the work naturally.
Here’s the truth I’ve come to believe more than almost anything else about this sport:
Our mental game is trainable.
Not “just to think positive” trainable.
I mean neurologically trainable.
As I have proven to you through my story, most players aren’t losing because they don’t know the shot.
They lose because pressure changes the state of their brain before they ever execute it.
The player who drills beautifully in the comfort of practice… doesn’t always quite show up the same way when it counts.
First, they rush. Then they tighten. Then they overthink and finally everything just speeds up where they can’t catch up.
We’ve been talking about this for many weeks now.
Question,
when I started talking about quickening; did your breath quicken also; or did your breathing stay slow and natural as before?
Either way, you didn’t force it. It just happened.
Those whose breathing stayed calm, that’s the whole idea behind this Brain Fitness series.
The higher-level players — the calm 4.0s, 4.5s, 5.0s you’ve watched or maybe even played — they aren’t trying harder.
They’re operating in a different rhythm.
The game slows down for them.
They see patterns earlier.
They recover faster.
And here’s what we’ve learned:
that calmer rhythm isn’t a personality trait.
It’s a brain state.
Which means it can be trained.
Up to now in our series, everything I’ve guided you through has used audio entrainment. Binaural beats. Isochronic tones. Layered solfeggio frequencies.
And it works — that’s why you’re here, because you’ve felt it work.
But audio is one sensory pathway into the brain.
Another is through light and to be specific, patterned light sequences.
This brings us to our announcement.
While I was studying brainwave entrainment and guided visualization, I came to know Patrick Porter PhD, a neuroscientist and expert in the study and applications of how sound and light frequencies coordinated with guided visualization can change the way the brain interprets the world.
Your auditory system and your visual system work together to pull your brain into the target rhythm depending on what you are working on in your life.
In our case, it is for our pickleball performance, but these processes work for all parts of your life.
What this gives you is three things I care about as a player and coach.
The first is speed.
When you’re entraining with audio alone, it takes time for the brain to settle into the target state. Eight, ten, sometimes twelve minutes before you’re really there.
When you add synchronized light, that window shortens. The brain finds the rhythm faster.
Why does that matter on the court?
Because you don’t always have twenty minutes before a match.
Sometimes you have five.
A pre-match session that used to need fifteen minutes can become a sharp, focused five.
Recovery between matches now becomes realistic instead of aspirational.
The second is depth.
I’ve talked a lot in this series about Theta — the state where skills install, where mental rehearsal actually takes root, where the patterns we want to own get encoded.
Audio alone can get you there. But for some players, especially when you’re newer to this kind of training, Theta is hard to access consistently. Some days you get there. Some days you don’t quite.
The combined light-and-sound entrainment helps you find that depth more reliably. The state you’ve been chasing in our sessions becomes more available, more repeatable.
Which means the installation effect — the part where the work actually sticks — gets stronger.
And the third is what I’ll call precision.
Through Dr. Porter’s invention called the BrainTap platform, we now have access to a deep library of sessions Dr. Porter and his team have built over decades — targeted protocols for stress regulation, sleep, focus, recovery, heart rate variability training, cognitive sharpening — the foundational brain-fitness work for our whole body and our whole life, including, of course, our Pickleball performance.
Layered with the pickleball-specific sessions I’ve built for the DUPR Brain Fitness Series, through BrainTap you get something we couldn’t offer before.
A complete system.
The general brain fitness underneath.
The pickleball-specific performance training on top.
Tournament tomorrow morning? Run a BrainTap sleep protocol the night before,
then our new pre-match activation session in the morning.
Tough loss in the first round?
Run our updated recovery protocol, then our reset session, before round two.
Working on your dink patience?
Layer focus training with our new Dink Mind session.
Each piece reinforcing the other.
There’s one more thing I want to say about Dr. Porter, because credibility matters here.
This isn’t a new tool that just appeared. Dr. Porter has spent more than four decades in neuroscience brainwave research. The BrainTap technology has been used by hundreds of thousands of people — clinically, in wellness practices, in performance settings — long before pickleball came calling.
What we’ve done is bring that proven brain-fitness foundation… and built pickleball performance on top of it.
It’s the partnership I would have wanted to exist when I started this work.
And now it does.
So when you put the headset on and run one of these enhanced sessions, you’re getting:
The protocols I built specifically for your DUPR journey…
On top of the brain-fitness foundation Dr. Porter spent a career building…
Delivered through technology that uses both your ears and your eyes to guide your brain into the state you need…
Faster, deeper, more reliably than anything we’ve had access to before.
That’s the partnership.
That’s what’s different.
As we close out this session.
Breathe in slowly through your nose… 1,2,3,4
Hold for 1,2,3,4,5,6
And let it go… 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8
And hold for 1,2
Let’s come all the way back now.
Feel your body again.
The surface under you.
The room around you.
Eyes open when you’re ready.
Now — what you just felt as in all of this version of the brain fitness, that small drop into a deeper, quieter state… that’s a taste. That’s audio alone, guiding you.
Imagine that same state, found faster, held longer, more reliably — with BrainTap added.
Imagine running that before your next match. After a tough loss. The night before a tournament.
That’s what’s now available to you.
So here’s how you experience it.
We’re opening the enhanced BrainTap DUPR Brain Fitness for Pickleball program with a two-week free trial.
No commitment. No catch.
You get full access to the whole BrainTap program, over 2000 sessions guided by Dr. Porter, plus the pickleball-specific performance sessions, the pre-match protocols, the recovery sessions, the skill-installation work, and prep for your best nights sleep— for fourteen days.
Once you’re in the app, search for pickleball, or search for whatever else is going on in your life you’d like to get some relief from.
Run them. Feel them. Decide based on your own experience whether this belongs in your pickleball training, as well as in your life in general.
To start your trial, go to:
https://sports.braintappartner.com/
One web address. Two weeks free. Everything included.
After your trial, if you choose to stay, the program becomes part of our membership — full ongoing access to the brain-fitness library, every new session we add, every protocol Dr. Porter and I develop as the partnership keeps evolving.
And if it’s not for you, you walk away with two weeks of training you didn’t have before. No harm done.
Also, you still have access to the original series here on Substack.
But here’s what I’ll ask you to do — and this matters.
Don’t think about whether this is for you.
You have felt whether this is for you over the past several weeks, when the court opened up in your mind and you have already started accelerating your love of the game through better performance.
Trust that.
Go to
https://sports.braintappartner.com/
to start your free trial, and let the next two weeks of training show you what your real ceiling looks like when your brain isn’t getting in the way.
I’m grateful you’re on this journey with me.
I’m grateful that Dr. Porter and the BrainTap team chose to build this with us.
And I’m grateful that the most important part of your game — the part nobody’s been training — finally has a system worthy of it.
I know, I’ve experienced it myself.
Remember to reset fast and play free,
This is now the rhythm of your life.
