Sports Vision Training for Athletes | Visual skills for Sports

Visual skills for Sports

Sports vision training helps an athlete improve their visual skills so they can

process information faster, make more accurate decisions and see things without

looking. 

Smooth Pursuits

Smooth pursuit movements are reflexive eye movements that are required when an object through an environment. The eyes move smoothly instead of I jump.

Can your athlete accurately track an object while it is moving and at different speeds without losing focus? This skill is very basic but many athletes lose focus and need to re-fixate due to visual fatigue.

Saccades

A saccade is a quick, jerk-like, simultaneous movement of both eyes between two or more points of fixation in the same direction.

Switching your eyes quickly to a target is fairly straightforward forward but are you able to do this at high speed and with accuracy? or does your athlete need to constantly

re-fixate on the target? Are they over shooting or undershooting? These extra

adjustments waste time and energy.

Visual Search

Visual Search is a type of perceptual task requiring attention that typically involves an active scan of the visual environment for a particular target among other distractions. 

Visually searching for correct information will decrease decision making and reaction time. Training this skill has a high pay off for athletic performance.

Dynamic Visual Acuity

Dynamic Visual Acuity is the ability to see an object moving when the player is stationary, or when the object is still and the athlete is in motion. It defines the ability of the eye to visually discern detail in a moving object.

Can your athlete see an object clearly when the object is in motion? Or even tougher, can they see objects clearly and make choices while they are in motion?

Having an athlete perform visual skills when moving their head into different positions increases the difficulty and the demands on their visual system.

Convergence Insufficiency

Convergence insufficiency is a condition where your eyes are unable to work together when looking at nearby objects. This condition causes one eye to turn outward instead of inward with the other eye creating double or blurred vision.

Having both eyes work together is imperative for performance. Having one eye slightly out of alignment will impact timing and depth perception. This information will feed to other body systems which will impact the athletes physical performance.

Binocular Vision

Binocular vision is the ability to maintain visual focus on an object with both eyes, creating a single visual image. Athletes without good binocular vision experience distortions in depth perception and the visual measurement of distance.

Accommodation

This is the ability of the eye to change its focus from distant to near objects (and vice versa). This process is achieved by the lens changing its shape.

Accommodation is the adjustment of the optics of the eye to keep an object in focus on the retina as its distance from the eye varies.

Switching eyes from near and far is a simple task but doing this at speed and at multiple angles is needed. An athlete might be good for one minute of this task but they need more endurance in the eye muscles to constantly move eyes from near to far accurately as this is a common movement across all sports.

Gaze Stabilisation

Gaze stabilization requires the ability of each eye to maintain a steady fixation on a point in space.

How stable are your athletes eyes? Can they hold fixation on different angles forlong periods of time?

Peripheral Vision

Side vision. The ability to see objects and movement outside of the direct line of vision. Peripheral vision is the work of the rods, nerve cells located largely outside the macula (the centre) of the retina. The rods are also responsible for night vision and low-light vision but are insensitive to colour as opposed to central vision.

What can your athlete see when they are not looking at it? This skill is needed in almost every sport but it is almost always under trained. Peripheral vision is a game changer. When it is well trained, athletes seem to be able to make quick decisions in play without ‘looking’.

Multi-Object Tracking

Tracking is the process of locating a moving object or multiple objects over time in a video stream. Tracking an object is not the same as object detection. Object detection is the process of locating an object of interest in a single frame. Tracking associates detections of an object across multiple frames. Due to the large amount of visual information we are exposed to, we need to selectively process some stimuli at the expense of others. 

This is called ability attention. Visual attention is the ability to selectively process certain parts of a visual scene. We are frequently faced with situations that place sustained demands on attention, as opposed to requiring only a few moments of focus.

How many players can your athlete track? How is their endurance and accuracy with multi object tracking? This skill is needed in almost all team sports.

Eye Hand Co-ordination

Eye-hand coordination is the coordinated control of eye movement with hand movement and the processing of visual information to guide the action of reaching and grasping along with the use of proprioception of the hands to guide the eyes.

It forms a part of the mechanisms used to perform everyday tasks See the target and reaction. How fast is your athlete able to perform these tasks?

How accurate are they? Can they stop at the last second when needed?

Visual Memory

Visual memory is the processing, storage and subsequent retrieval of visual information. It is one of the most fundamental components of learning. Recalling the sequence of letters that form a word for example, are an integral part of reading. Recalling images or landmarks are all part of visual memory and how we navigate the world.

Taking information in is one thing but can your athlete remember the information they took in and recall it? This skill is tested in team sports where athletes need to remember in a flash where their team mates are, who was running in what direction, how much space they have, and where the opposition are. Looking up quickly before making a pass means recalling all the information in that snapshot, making the decision on where to pass and then executing that.

Visual Processing Speed

The term “visual processing speed” is the amount of time needed to make a correct judgment about visual information. Processing speed is a cognitive ability. It is the time it takes a person to perform a mental task. It is related to the speed in which a person can understand and react to the information they receive, whether it be visual (letters and numbers), auditory (language), or movement. Processing speed is the time between receiving and responding to a stimulus.

Visual processing speed is needed at the highest level of sport. You must be able to take in that information faster than your opponent and then do something about it.

Sports Vision Training is not a magic bullet but without looking and training all the above visual skills you can be leaving a large amount of performance up to chance. We train the bodies of athletes vigorously in order for them to be able to withstand the physical demands sport places on them. However the systems our bodies use to judge what the body can and can not do and how fast, those systems are often not trained as hard as they could be, or at all. When you rely on a map to get from A to B do you hope that map is accurate? If it isn’t you have to slow down, back track and make mistakes. The same applies with the visual system. We rely on it so heavily to base all our movement decisions on, yet when athletes are expecting so much from their bodies they are only hoping the information they visually take in is correct. Often the solution to a performance plateau isn’t just to train harder or eat better. 

We can assume most top athletes are already doing that. We need to look a little deeper and save energy and time where we can, and prime the parts of performance that are heavily relied on but yet ignored. The sports world is moving faster than ever and everyone is looking for the edge. Sports vision may give your athlete that extra edge they need.