MICHAEL J. LAVERY    Michael J. Lavery is a pioneer in the field of applied neuroscience and brain function. He has over 25 years experience in research in the plasticity of the human brain and how overall whole brain power potential can be harnessed. Lavery has been featured on front cover of the Orange County Register and has been twice interviewed by The BBC radio program. He has appeared on the David Letterman Show, and made ESPN Sport's Center Top Ten Plays of the Day. He also has been featured in prominent newspaper and magazine articles about his pioneering ambidexterity skills in the sports of tennis and golf. Lavery also holds eight hand to eye coordination world records from Universal Records Data Base. He is an internationally renowned brain coach and trainer to athletes from all walks of life. Lavery was one of the first men to describe direct relationships to brain growth in the central nervous system and how it relates to across the board ambidexterity training, memory enhancement and dual handed fine motor controls of penmanship skills. This breakthrough is now being connected to the theory that the hands actually grow the brain and that this growth is due in major part to the myelination process. This in turn now changes the brain and body chemistry resulting in increased muscle mass and muscle density. Lavery's clients report major strides in improvements in endeavors such as improved academic performance, golf, tennis, baseball, playing musical instruments, communications skills and enhanced short term memory processing. Other benefits include mood elevation, greater capacity to focus, enhanced sleep etc. Michael is a father of four boys and currently practices in Laguna Beach California. For more information in Lavey's unique Whole Brain Power Coaching methodology Phone  US 1-858-692-9461 or e-mail michael@wholebrainpowercoaching.com Listen to case studies of Michael's Whole Brain Power Coaching students

Published: May 9, 2008 3:00 a.m. By TOM BERG / The Orange County Register   Brain Growth Guru Started With a Hammer And a Golf Ball A jock-turned-brain-student mixes mental and physical feats to boost brain power. Can it slow aging?   His journey started with a weak backhand. In the 1980s, Lavery was a strong open-tournament tennis player (a 5.5 in tennis rankings), but opponents could exploit his backhand. After losing a 1988 tournament, he said: "Scrap the backhand. I'm going to learn a left-handed forehand." For three years he had mixed success. "I was the only person that would play with him," says John Rushing, a tournament tennis player who figures he's played Lavery more than 1,000 times in his life. Rushing saw flashes of brilliance but still dominated - until 1991. Says Lavery, "I was stalled with my left-handed motor skills. So I decided to write left-handed - every single day." Three months later, it happened. He began serving left-handed aces. Hitting left-handed winners. Crushing opponents. Not only did his left-handed game improve, his right-handed game went through the roof. "The flood gate opened," says Rushing. "It was like the birth of a new player. He'd beat me, 6-0, 6-0, 6-0, 6-1, 6-0." Lavery says opposite-hand writing - particularly mirror writing, which is a truer ambidextrous method and one used by Leonardo da Vinci - is the cornerstone to rewiring the brain. "That's when everything started changing - and accelerating," he says. That led to his next discovery: If the technique worked in tennis, would it work in a sport he didn't play? Everyone said no. So he took up left-handed golf. PAR It was golf that turned Lavery into the Hammer Man. At age 43, he knew he'd never hit a golf ball as often as those who'd played all their lives. So he mimicked Tiger Woods in his famous Nike commercial by learning to bounce a golf ball on the face of his sand wedge - hundreds of times a day. One day he tried it with a hammer. He got so good that the Stanley Tool Co. filmed his official record of 3,194 consecutive hammer hits, which one day in 2005 made ESPN's "Top 10 Plays of the Day." That led to an appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman. One hammer led to two - one in each hand. Which led to bouncing golf balls off the ball of a ball-peen hammer (394 times). Which led to sledge hammers. His forearms - and his reputation - grew. In four years of playing ambidextrous golf, he was shooting par. The combination of ambidextrous motor skills, memory drills and penmanship drills changed him physically and mentally. The man who taught him to golf stood in disbelief. "There's no way someone your age, shooting 110, could become a scratch (par) golfer in four years," Rolly White told Lavery. "Can you teach me?" The real question was this: Was Lavery a freak of nature or had he stumbled upon a system anyone could learn? A BETTER LIFE White began bouncing a balloon off two 4-pound sledge hammers. Now he's bouncing a tennis ball off 8-pound sledge hammers. He began memorizing the alphabet backward. Now he can tell you that 2 to the 60th power is 1,152,921,504,606,846,976. He began a journal of right-handed penmanship. Now he's writing left-handed mirror image. "I'm 60," says the mortgage consultant and Chairman of Board of AutoRealty Products. "My tennis is better than it was in my 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. My golf is the best it's ever been. My memory - I don't even have to look at my notes from a month ago. I'll never quit this." Lavery says his program unleashes the underused half of the brain in a way that improves not only athletic performance, but brain performance. This puts him at the forefront of a spiraling brain-health industry that includes books, supplements, websites and software. Sales of fit-brain software grew from $100 million in 2005 to $225 million in 2007, says Alvaro Fernandez, CEO and co-founder of Sharp Brains Web site, based in San Francisco. He predicts it will hit $2 billion by 2015. Some of this growth is feeding on people's fears of Alzheimer's disease, he says, but much is based on new research that shows our brains our more plastic than once thought. In other words, they can improve with exercise, just like the body. Case in point is Lavery's star student, chess champion Vaughan Heussenstamm, 23, of Irvine, who writes with either hand, plays tennis and guitar with either hand, surfs and snowboards with either foot in front. And while juggling he can recite the power of 2 up to the 64th power and 3 up to the 31st power. "I'm not just trying to win a chess game," he says. "I'm building a life. And my life is getting pretty miraculous." Thanks to Laguna Beach street painter who can leverage lift a 16-pound sledgehammer and lower it - with one hand - to his nose. A man who can place a pen in each hand and simultaneously write in opposite directions. Who can run wind sprints while bouncing a golf ball off a hammer - and recite Shakespeare while doing it. No magic pills, no cure-alls, but Michael Lavery seems to be onto something.

Tricks of the Trade Whether he’s using a hammer or an upside-down 3-wood, Michael Lavery has developed a unique way to play the game. Article From Southland Golf Magazine - By Joel Beers Published

Engage in a conversation with Michael Lavery and you’re liable to hear terms that don’t often pop up when golf is the subject: homunculus theory, Leonardo Da Vinci, cerebral cortex, graphology. Pretty high-falutin’ stuff when you consider that Lavery’s immediate goal is breaking the world record for the longest distance traveled while bouncing a golf ball off a hammer. But Lavery’s skill with a golf ball and club — he can hit a ball more than 350 yards from the left and right side and can also execute an array of trick shots, such as driving the ball with an upside down 3-wood —  is more than a novelty. He’s convinced that he’s found a better way to learn, practice and play the game through his 20-year study of hand-eye coordination. “When I picked up golf three years ago, I told people that I was going to shoot par,” said Lavery, a 46-year-old Laguna Beach resident. “They said I was nuts since I’d picked up the game relatively late in life. But I’m well on my way.” Lavery, a painter, taught himself to be ambidextrous through emulating something the great Da Vinci was proficient in: simultaneously writing with both hands. This skill enables Lavery to serve a tennis ball at more than 100 mph with both hands and to generate phenomenal distance in golf with an amazingly short backswing. “Because I have back problems, I can’t get a shoulder turn like a lot of golfers, so I’ve learned to lift my left leg up as high as a baseball pitcher and get more than 370 yards off my drive, and hit it consistently straight,” he said. “It’s not the way most people swing, and no one would ever teach that. But it works for me.” The secret? “I’ve achieved a hand-eye coordination through training for 20 years that allows me to do things with a golf ball that most people think are impossible,” said Lavery, who spent a couple of years in the Toronto Blue Jays organization and was also an accomplished amateur in tennis and hockey. “First I just started bouncing golf balls off the wedge like Tiger, then I started using the putter face,” Lavery said. “But I did it 500 times in a row and I thought that’s kind of boring. Being an artist, I deal with hammers and I’m constantly building frames and such. So, I started fooling around with bouncing the ball off the head of a hammer. I did it 20 times and thought, ‘that’s pretty good.’ Then I started thinking, ‘why not 100?’” Lavery soon created a golf club that uses the head of a hammer welded to a 46-inch shaft. With his enhanced hand-eye coordination, Lavery can hit a ball 300 yards with a clubhead that has a surface area of less than an inch. “When I use a regulation club it’s like there’s a toaster on the clubhead, so I’m able to really whack it,” he said. And really bounce it. “I can bounce the balls running, climbing up stairs, doing just about anything,” said Lavery, who is talking to the Stanley Tool Company about trying to set the world record at its Connecticut headquarters. He plans to walk a mile  while bouncing a ball off the head of a hammer. Lavery, who has immersed himself in reading about theories on how the right and left halves of the brain communicate and process information,  believes that athletic performance can be enhanced by adopting those theories. “There has been a lot of research over the last 40 years about how the brain works, and they’re discovering that different portions of the brain are used in different areas of athletics,” Lavery said, citing putting as a right-brain activity (more spatial, intuitive and creative than the more logical, analytical left-brain). It stands to reason, Lavery said, that someone who isn’t good at putting can improve by increasing the use of the right side of their brain. One way to do that is to force the right side of the brain to involve itself more in activities such as handwriting. “I’ve studied the way the brain works out of curiosity and because I’m an artist and I’m wondering what you can do as an artist to enhance your creativity,” Lavery said. “I’d always played around with handwriting with both hands. I can write backwards with my left hand at the same time as writing with my right, and you can’t tell the difference. I think that’s trained my brain to do things that it otherwise wouldn’t have learned. And I think that’s why I have the ability to bounce a golf ball off a hammer, or serve a tennis ball with both hands. It’s a degree of coordination and spatial influence I wouldn’t have otherwise. Basically, I’ve taught my brain how to multitask, which helps my short-term memory, and I think that’s helped me pick up the game of golf as quickly as I have.” Lavery would love to parlay his eccentric gift into a full-time job by getting sponsors who see the entertainment and educational value in a trick-shot artist who can talk as well as perform. “I know what I’m talking about and I make these demonstrations fun,” Lavery said. “People really trip out when they see these incredible things I do. I think I’d be great for a charity golf tournament, because I can tee up a ball 4 inches off the ground, knock it 350 yards with a club with a hammer for a head and then talk about why it’s possible.” For more information in Lavey's unique Whole Brain Power Coaching methodology Phone  US 1-858-692-9461 or e-mail michael@wholebrainpowercoaching.com Listen to case studies of Michael's Whole Brain Power Coaching students.