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High-Performance Vision
Improving your visual skills - and acuity- can give you an edge in virtually any sport. Here’s how to start seeing more.
By Kara Douglass Thom |
December 2007 |
Benefits
of Better Vision
Be a Good Pupil
Visual Cues
See the Light
Eighty percent of all sensory information comes from sight, so it makes sense
that mastering the visual skills most useful to your sport would be a prime
performance-enhancing technique. But recent advances in sports-vision training
have taken that concept to a new level, producing a progressive and interactive
series of vision exercises (provided by software or a specialist) that can help
improve your peripheral vision, eye-hand-body coordination, depth perception
and spatial awareness.
There’s been little research on how — or even if — sports-vision
training works, but its anecdotal success is compelling enough that many Olympic
and professional athletes, as well as high school and college sports teams,
are making it part of their fitness programs. It’s easy to add a few elements
of vision training to your regimen as well.
The benefits of vision training are obvious for baseball, football and hockey
players. In baseball, for instance, improving eye-hand-body coordination and
depth perception can reduce strikeouts and help you more easily field the ball.
Athletes competing in endurance sports such as triathlon, running or cycling
can benefit in similar ways, says Thomas Wilson, OD, coauthor of Sports
Vision: Training for Better Performance (Human Kinetics,
2004). “Those are very visual sports, too,” explains Wilson, who
practices in Colorado Springs, Colo. “The athlete is constantly reacting
to a changing visual environment.”
Benefits
of Better Vision
Sports-vision training can help you improve your performance in a variety of
ways:
How much you see. Training the eyes to comprehend
more objects in a short period of time allows you to collect more data for decision-making
and improve reaction time.
Eye-tracking ability. Looking efficiently from
one point in space to another will improve your position and help you avoid
obstacles.
Focus. The goal goes from keeping your eyes on
the ball to focusing on the trademark symbol on the ball’s logo.
Angles of pursuit. You constantly adjust your
course to be the shortest and most efficient path between you and the object
you’re trying to reach.
Speed trajectory. The quality of visual information
affects your ability to perceive speed and direction, which affects timing,
balance and decision-making.
Depth perception. Knowing how far away objects
are also influences timing, balance and decision-making.
Eye-hand, eye-foot, eye-body coordination. The
synergy between your vision and your movement is a critical skill in a wide
variety of sports.
Spatial awareness. You can improve your ability
to determine how your position relates to other athletes and objects.
Peripheral awareness. Increasing your ability
to view objects around you provides a great advantage in a number of different
sports.
Be
a Good Pupil
Sports-vision-training techniques can vary among specialists, but you’ll
typically go through certain steps in any reputable program. First up is an
eye examination and corrections, if necessary, to bring your general eyesight
up to speed. (See Web Extra! for tips.) Next, the specialist
will evaluate your sport-specific visual skills.
You might don various shaded lenses and 3-D glasses to help gauge your skills
under different conditions. You might play a series of “video games,”
recalling the direction of a series of arrows or attacking dots as they move
around a screen. With a pair of red-blue filtered glasses, you might assess
your aim by placing a red image on top of a blue image or finding one image
that isn’t like the others.
After the assessment, your doctor will prescribe various eye exercises that
address your weaknesses and cultivate sport-specific skills. With repeated experience,
the brain will retain these more efficient and improved processes — very
much like the muscle memory involved in training for a marathon or hitting a
tennis ball. “The wiring between the brain, the eyes and the body have
an impact on long-term visual memory,” says Barry L. Seiller, MD, founder
of the Visual Fitness Institute and Vizual Edge, a software company in Vernon
Hills, Ill.
Wilson will often “load” his patient’s eyes with information
while the athlete is working on a sport-specific skill such as passing a basketball,
kicking a soccer ball or riding a stationary trainer. On a bike, for instance,
the athlete works on changing his focus from what is immediately in front of
him to what is coming up ahead, to decide what he should react to immediately
and what he needs to anticipate. As an athlete becomes proficient, Wilson ups
the ante by making the physical work harder — increasing speed or resistance,
or making the athlete stand up and sit down while doing the eye exercises. The
same eye exercise becomes tougher because of the physiological distractions,
but such conditions mimic actual game or race conditions — or even go
beyond. “If you stress the visual system to its limits, and then you take
it back to status quo, it will perform more efficiently,” he says.
You can also incorporate sports-vision therapy through your computer. Seiller’s
Vizual Edge Performance Trainer CD-ROM includes a visual skills assessment that
allows athletes to evaluate their visual skills before and after training. Through
a series of interactive exercises, athletes train their eyes in various skills
and get instant feedback on their strengths and weaknesses.
Visual
Cues
Maybe your favorite sport doesn’t require you to “keep your eye
on the ball” or find the open areas in a field of players. Still, a keener
sense of sight might provide subtle benefits that mean getting to the finish
line faster or preventing mishaps that could hinder your ability to get there
at all.
If your performance is at a plateau, even though you’ve maxed out all
training possibilities, sports-vision training might be just the resource to
help you break through.
Kara Douglass Thom is a freelance writer specializing in health and
fitness.
See
the Light
Two easy exercises Thomas A. Wilson, OD, recommends to improve vision for sports-related
activity.
Flashlight Chase
Purpose: To integrate eye movements and motor
response in all regions of your gaze
Materials: Two flashlights
Procedure:
1. Work in a darkened room with a large, blank wall, if possible.
2. Have a coach or partner stand next to you and move a flashlight beam around
the wall.
3. Track the path of the beam with your own flashlight, keeping your head still.
4. Use smooth patterns and quick jumps from point to point. Cover all areas
of the wall.
Signs Of Improvement: Increased ability to stay
with the target light while keeping your head still; improved accuracy with
increasing speed.
Near-Far Eye Jump
Purpose: To change focus quickly and accurately
from a near point to a far point
Materials: Two targets (use sport-specific targets,
for example, two baseballs or two tennis balls)
Procedure:
1. Place one target 4 inches or less away.
2. Place the second target two to 10 feet away.
3. Look at the near target, then the far target, and back to the near target.
Make sure to focus your eyes on each target before looking away.
4. Do 30 to 40 near-far eye jumps — or continually for three to five minutes
— each day.
Signs Of Improvement: Focusing becomes easier;
speed or number of jumps in the allotted time increases (when this happens,
move second target farther away).
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