Willie Gault & Athletes for Life

Willie Gault is an amazing guy!  Aside from being a Super Bowl champion wide receiver and kick returner with the 1986 Chicago Bears (he played 11 seasons in the NFL, 6 with the Bears and then 5 with the Raiders) , he was also a world champion and world record holder on the 1983 US Men’s 4 x 100 meter relay team (with Carl Lewis).  What’s he doing now?  He’s giving back.  In a big way.

Athletes for Life (www.athletesforlife.com) is a foundation he started to help “save lives, one heart at a time”.  They have a 5th wheel trailer (we’re standing in front of it in the picture), inside of which is state-of-the-art cardiac monitoring equipment and treadmills.  They travel around the country administering free (with donations, of course) cardiac stress test analyses to children, student athletes, and adults.  So what’s so different from maybe going to a doctor’s office or maybe even a cardiologist?

First, not everyone can afford to go to the doctor or the cardiologist.  That’s one thing.  But the most important aspect is the equipment they’re using.  The majority of electro-cardiograph (ECG) machines in use today in tens of thousands of hospitals and doctors’ offices filter the electronic pulses of the heart down to a frequency range of between 0.5 and 40 Hz (that’s cycles per second).  You’ve all seen that stereotypical “sinus rhythm” graph that they always show on TV.

But the heart produces electrical pulses all the way up to 150 Hz.  What happens to those signals?  In the existing machines, all those signals are filtered out like noise.  The problem is that some of of the more deadly heart conditions only present indications in that higher frequency range.  The Athletes for Life Foundation uses the Heart Tronics (hearttronics.com) Fidelity 100 12-lead wireless cardiac monitoring device that captures the heart’s electrical pulses through the entire frequency range so that those hard-to-detect conditions can be seen.  Willie is also the president of Heart Tronics.

So go visit athletesforlife.com to learn about their work and to volunteer or donate.  Go to hearttronics.com to learn more about the science behind the device and to view videos of the device being shown on TV.

Thanks, Willie for all that you do!

Oh, one last thing.  At the Isagenix Celebration conference, Willie’s medical team did more than a hundred evaluations for attendees over a 3 day period.  They discovered a handful of issues requiring further medical attention, and they even sent one fellow directly to the emergency room.  Probably saved that man’s life.  That’s the kind of difference he’s making.