What is Sports Vision?
Sports Vision Training Can Give You a Serious Edge Over Your Competition
Sports Vision Training isn’t about correcting your vision. You wear glasses or contacts for that. Vision Therapy is about training (or retraining) the brain to achieve maximum efficiency in the way it processes and responds to visual inputs. Sports Vision is about training people with excellent vision to process and respond to what they see faster and better. Using a personalized and customized series of techniques and exercises, the brain learns to respond more accurately and efficiently. It’s just like muscle memory. Once you know and refine exactly how to react, you can do it again and again, and get better every time.
An athlete on the top of his or her game needs neuro-visual responses that are dynamic, precise, and fully aligned every time, all of the time. Visit Impact Vision Therapy for a comprehensive assessment.
Visual Processing Is How Sport Is Played
Vision is way more than how well you read off a chart. Having 20/20 vision doesn’t count for much if you can’t properly track a ball with your eyes, or anticipate where your opponent is headed. If you can’t intercept the play and turn it around, how are you going to succeed?
Sport is all about the visual. The eye sees, the brain interprets and leads, and the body follows. Coaches, athletes, and pundits alike need to keep in mind that the visual processing our brain does is prone to fumbles. Incorrect or poorly timed responses are what hold back good athletes from becoming great. Even with the best coaching and tactics, sports performance can suffer if not properly honed. Bad habits need to be reversed, while positive skills need to be nurtured. This is what sports vision is all about.
The visual system summarizes what is seen, then tells the brain to activate the muscles to execute a motor action. Vision directs the intelligent movement of the body (the eyes lead the body). The more accurate the visual system can take in and process visual information, the more accurate it can direct appropriate motor movement.
What Happens When Our Visual System Is Inaccurate?
- Ball not always seen clearly
- Over or under-estimating the distance of the ball
- Difficulty making the “shot,” “pass” or “play”
- Performance in competition deteriorates late in the game or under stress
- Prone to repeating similar mistakes again and again
- Inconsistent performance
- Fatigue
You CAN optimize, correct, and enhance your visual skills through training! Be the athlete you know you can be. Let Dr. Joshua Watt help.
Sports Vision Training Enhances The Following Skills:
The vision/brain skills listed below provide significant benefit in every sport.
For the purposes of providing a real-life example, we will use baseball below.
- eye tracking and movement precision– Follow the moving ball more accurately
- enhanced peripheral awareness– Detect someone stealing a base.
- target localization
- visual discrimination
- faster, more accurate hand-eye coordination– Be more accurate at batting, throwing, and pitching, by improving the eye’s ability to direct body movement.
- vision-balance integration– Balance relies on vision, and most aspects of sports performance can be improved with better balance.
- visual reaction time– As the 90 mph baseball comes flying at you, every improvement in the time it takes to react to visual stimuli is essential.
- visualization
- dynamic visual acuity– see the ball while in motion, clearly.
- depth perception and distance estimation– Assess more accurately and quickly the speed and distance of a moving object.
- focusing– rapidly change focus from near and far, such as a quick transition from getting the ball from the glove (close work) to throwing it to first base (far).
- Contrast Sensitivity– Improved contrast improves the ability to see the ball against a white sky.
Sports Vision Training For Baseball
Baseball requires better than 20/20 vision. In fact, the vast majority of MLB baseball players have better than 20/15 vision. Odds are that if you can’t see at least as well as 20/15 then you aren’t going to make it into professional baseball.
And it’s more than visual acuity which makes a great baseball player. You have to be able to see where the ball is in any background and accurately gauge where and when to swing, pitch, and throw. This requires exceptional depth perception and contrast sensitivity, amongst other visual skills.
At Impact Vision Therapy in Pueblo, Colorado, we work with aspiring and professional baseball athletes to hone and enhance their athletic visual skills through advanced Sports Vision Training techniques.
Sports Vision Training For Basketball
A basketball player depends on a number of visual processes in order to be at the top of his or her game. Judging the ball in motion and the distance, direction, and speed of players all depends on balance, proper eye tracking, and hand-eye coordination.
These vision skills can be improved and enhanced through sports vision training—turning a good player into a great one.
Sports Vision Training For Football
The core athletic skills in football players come down to how rapidly and accurately they visually interpret and react in real-time. These skills can be refined, improved, and enhanced through sports vision training. The vision skills that are pivotal for a football player’s success include:
- Hand-eye coordination
- Peripheral vision
- Reaction time
- Visual memory
- Depth-perception
For an assessment of more information, please give Impact Vision Therapy a call.
The Research On Sports Vision Enhancement
Improved Batting Averages
A study of the University of Cincinnati baseball team showed drastic improvement in the batting averages of players following six weeks of various kinds of vision training. The team batting average went up 34 points from the previous season, exceeding improvements of other N.C.A.A. teams. Errors decreased by 15 %, while fielding assists increased by 8 %. Across all tracked batting parameters, vision training showed improvements of 10% or more.
Another study conducted out of the University of California Riverside tested the effects of Vision Training on real-life applications with their own college baseball team. The athletes on their baseball team were able to improve their reading of eye charts by 30 percent — as well as their batting averages — after completing more than two dozen 25-minute vision training sessions using a computer program. According to the study, “trained players showed improved vision after training, had decreased strike-outs, and created more runs”.
Contact Dr. Joshua Watt to stay at the top of your game.
Vision Training Works For All Sports
Numerous studies have tracked the benefit of Vision Training for athletes from many different sports. Some of the sports that have shown improvement in performance are hockey, table tennis, golf, rugby, soccer, and tennis. For sports with rapid movements, the athletes who have undergone sports vision training have a significant advantage over their competition.
Call our office today.
At Impact Vision Therapy, we work with athletes in just about every sport to sharpen their game skills. These include:
- Baseball & softball
- Basketball
- Golf
- Football
- MMA
- Lacrosse
- Soccer
- Wrestling
- and much more
Impact Vision Therapy provides Advanced Sports Performance Training serving Pueblo, Colorado Springs, Castle Pines, Parker, and throughout Colorado.
References
Clark JF, Ellis JK, Bench J, Khoury J, Graman P (2012) High-Performance Vision Training Improves Batting Statistics for University of Cincinnati Baseball Players. PLoS ONE 7(1): e29109. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0029109
Deveau J, Ozer DJ, Seitz AR. Improved vision and on-field performance in baseball through perceptual learning. Curr Biol. 2014;24(4):R146–R147. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2014.01.004
