Improve Vision with Sports Vision Training

Whether you are an amateur or professional athlete, when you take part in your preferred sporting activity, you want to pull your best performance out of the bag every single time. What if there was a way that you could enhance it even further, simply by training your eyes? Now there is, thanks to sports vision training.

Did you know that vision accounts for the majority of sensory information received and processed by your brain? This means that what you see is crucial in your understanding of the world and what is happening around you. Nowhere is this more obvious than when you are participating in a sporting activity. For example, someone who plays tennis needs to have exceptional hand-eye coordination, great depth perception, and the ability to see and react to objects moving at high speeds to play with any degree of competency. The greater these visual skills are, the better your performance is likely to be.

What is performance vision training and what visual skills can it help with?

Performance vision training is designed specifically to sharpen and improve a variety of visual skills that could help enhance your performance in your preferred sport. These include:

• Dynamic visual acuity: the ability to see objects that are in motion clearly, usually at speed such as a baseball pitch, and be able to react to them. Similarly, this also applies if you are the one moving at speed towards a stationary object, such as a hurdle.
   

• Focusing: being able to change focus between different objects clearly and quickly.
   

• Depth perception: the ability to determine the speed and distance of objects.
   

• Eye-tracking: following an object or person moving at speed accurately.
   

• Hand-eye or body-eye coordination: using your eyes to decide how your hands/body should move within your chosen sport or activity.
   

• Reaction time: this refers to how quickly you can perceive and react to a stimulus, such as catching a ball that has been thrown to you.
   

• Contrast sensitivity: the ability to tell the difference between an object and its background.
   

• Balance: vision and balance go hand and hand, so if you have problems with your vision, you could find that your balance is also affected. Performance vision training will help ensure that your vision does not affect your balance and vice-versa.
  
   

What to expect from sports vision training?

Sports vision training is tailored to the individual needs of each patient and the visual skills that they need for their chosen sport. Your vision training specialist will speak to you about the activities you take part in and assess your current visual skills to determine which areas could be improved.

Using this information, you will have your training plan created. This will usually involve a combination of exercises and games, that can be performed both in-office and at home. The improvement will be monitored through reassessment, usually several months later since skills develop gradually.

 

If you are interested in sports vision training to improve your visual performance, contact Blue River Vision in Silverthorne, CO at (970) 451-0015.