Add Slow-Paced Contraction to Heart Rate Variability Biofeedback Training

August 3, 2023

12-1pm ET

Heart rate variability (HRV) biofeedback is a “Swiss Army Knife” intervention with demonstrated efficacy in clinical disorders like depression, diabetes, and hypertension, and optimal performance.
This session begins by explaining HRV and its role in health and performance. It provides an overview of the processes that generate HRV, focusing on Vaschillo’s Two-Closed-Loop model. It summarizes the resonance frequency and 0.1 Hz slow-paced breathing protocols to increase HRV. It details how to deliver slow-paced contraction training and explains where it may be more appropriate than slow-paced breathing. Finally, it explains how HRV biofeedback training can combine slow-paced breathing and contraction to enlarge your clients’ self-regulation “tool kits.”

Participants will be able to:

• Attendees will be able to explain the role of HRV in health and performance.
• Attendees will be able to describe resonance frequency and 0.1 Hz protocols
  used in HRV biofeedback training.
• Attendees will be able to describe how to provide slow-paced contractio training to increase HRV.
• Attendees will be able to identify situations where slow-paced contraction may be more appropriate than slow-paced breathing to increase HRV.

Fredric Bruce Shaffer, PhD, BCB, BCB-HRV is a Biological Psychologist who consults on heart rate variability, physiological psychology, and psychopharmacology. He has proudly taught at Truman since 1975. He earned a BA in Psychology and Political Science with a minor in Philosophy/ Religion from Claremont Men’s College in 1971 then he completed a MS in Clinical Psychology in 1973 and a PhD in Social-Personality Psychology in 1975 from Oklahoma State University. In 2008, He received the Walker and Doris Allen Fellowship for Faculty Excellence at Truman State University. In In 2019, I received the Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback’s (AAPB) Distinguished Scientist award. He has trained biofeedback professionals in Aveiro, Canberra, Cardiff, Eindhoven, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, Munich, Rome, Thailand, and Venice (Aaron Truitt joined Chris Wally and me in Rome.) He provide online biofeedback, neurofeedback, and qEEG education through BioSource Software LLC. He has served as Chair and Treasurer of the Biofeedback Certification International Alliance (BCIA), which certifies professionals in 35 countries. (BCIA Board members joined me for a June, 2017 Golden, Colorado retreat.) In 2021, BCIA created a scholarship in his honor for HRV Biofeedback applicants. Currently, he is an associate editor of the journal Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback, and contributing editor for Biofeedback magazine and he is one of five co-editors of Evidence-Based Practice in Biofeedback and Neurofeedback (4th ed.), Foundations of Heart Rate Variability Biofeedback, and Physiological Recording Technology in Biofeedback and Neurofeedback.