Did you know that 80% of what the brain processes during a sports game comes via the eyes, and that much of that input is transmitted from our peripheral vision?

Peripheral vision, also known as peripheral awareness, enables us to detect and see things that aren’t right in front of us when we are looking straight ahead. Athletes with poor peripheral awareness may not realize that a player or ball is coming toward them from the side, putting them at higher risk of injury while playing sports.

One way to improve peripheral awareness is through sports vision training, a customized program that improves the communication between your eyes, brain, and body while playing sports. These learned visual skills can be useful in so many other areas of life as well. The sports vision program is offered by optometrists trained in sports vision training.

Why is Peripheral Vision Critical to Playing Sports?

Peripheral vision is an often overlooked aspect of sports performance. Well developed peripheral vision is essential in sports like football, where the players need to be aware of the sudden movement on either side of them. When football players dash across the field, their peripheral vision helps guide their path.

Improving peripheral vision can also help you avoid sports injuries. It can help athletes avoid or brace themselves for a collision or detect a fast-moving object approaching from the side. Additionally, sports vision training can help an athlete improve reaction time, hand-eye coordination, and processing speed.

Eye Exercises to Improve Peripheral Awareness

Here are 2 home-based eye exercises that may improve an athlete’s peripheral vision. Note: these are not a substitute for a comprehensive vision training program offered by a sports vision optometrist.

• Awareness Drill

One way to improve peripheral vision is to stop what you’re doing and focus on being aware of what is in your peripheral fields.

• Stop and “be present”
• Pick a target to look at anywhere from 3 to 10 feet away
• While looking straight ahead, take note of what you can see around you – to your left and right, and up and down
• Test yourself: Pick out specific details, then confirm by looking directly at the object.

The goal of this exercise is to stretch your vision farther and enhance your ability to focus on things on either side of you. It’s an easy drill that can lead to a noticeable improvement in your peripheral awareness.

• Wall Ball

This exercise requires just a wall and a ball, such as a tennis ball.

• Find a spot on the wall to look at, just above eye level
• Throw the ball against the wall, bouncing it from your left hand and catching it with your right hand and then back again
• While you are throwing the ball, keep looking at the spot on the wall and not directly at the ball. Instead, use your peripheral vision to detect the ball’s flight and position in space

You will most likely drop the ball a few times while you get used to the exercise. It will take some practice to get your eyes to relax enough to be able to do this. Once you master one level, try to think of ways to challenge yourself by making this exercise more difficult. You should try doing this once a day, for 10-15 minutes.

Peripheral vision awareness is one of the visual skills most necessary for safety while playing sports. Having good peripheral vision awareness could keep you from getting hit by a frisbee at the park, or from taking a bad hit while on the court or field.

Taking the necessary steps to improve your peripheral awareness can not only improve your game but protect you from injury. Contact Dr. Patrick Quaid, Dr. Hadassah Rutman, & Dr. Daniel Cunningham to learn more about vision therapy.

VUE Sports Vision Center serves patients from , North York, Kitchener, and York, throughout Ontario.

Each year, between 1.7 million to 3 million sports and recreation-related concussions occur in the U.S. alone. Of those, roughly 70-80% of the people experience vision problems.

So how can you prevent head injuries? Consider sports vision training. It not only improves performance but can also protect your head from injury.

What is Sports Vision Training?

Sports vision training isn’t about correcting your eyesight.

Rather, it’s a customized program made to improve the communication between your eyes, brain, and body while playing sports. It helps amateur and professional athletes process information and then react faster and more accurately to what they see on the field, court, or rink.

Sports vision training uses a personalized series of techniques and exercises, that teaches the brain and body to respond more accurately and efficiently to the fastball or hockey puck rapidly coming toward you. The training focuses on improving visual skills, such as depth perception, hand-eye coordination, eye tracking, focusing, and peripheral vision.

Sports Vision Training and Sport-Related Head Injuries

Head injuries, especially concussions, are among the most common injuries incurred while playing sports. However, they can be prevented!

If your visual skills are not functioning at their peak, you may misjudge the distance between yourself and the ball or yourself you and other players. Miscalculating the velocity of a ball or the positioning of other athletes due to poor peripheral vision can result in serious injury, head or other.

Just as you train your muscles to be at your peak, so too, you must train your eyes to communicate more efficiently with your brain and body.

Does Sports Vision Training Lead to a Decrease In Sport-Related Injuries?

Studies show that players who undergo sports vision training have significantly fewer concussions than their peers.

One study, conducted by the University of Cincinnati Division of Sports Medicine, found that university football players who underwent sports vision training to improve their peripheral vision had fewer concussions than those who did not undergo the training.

In short, sports vision training teaches the the eyes and brain to react better to the changing environment, leading to increased success with fewer injury-causing collisions.

Want to take your game to the next level? Contact VUE Sports Vision Center today.

We serve patients from , North York, Kitchener, and York, throughout Ontario.

Every year, about 33 million children worldwide sustain a concussion. Even more worrying, children who have already experienced a concussion are at heightened risk of experiencing a second concussion, according to a systematic review and meta-analysis of seven research studies, the British Journal of Sports Medicine reported.

While protective gear and non-contact rules are reducing the incidence of concussions, many coaches, athletes and parents aren’t aware that sports vision training can lower the risk of sustaining a head injury like a concussion by developing an athlete’s visual skills. Find out what sports vision training is and how it can help prevent a concussion.

What is Sports Vision Training?

The goal of sports vision training is to improve the way the eyes communicate with the brain to achieve maximum efficiency while playing sports.

Sports vision training is a customized program created by your optometrist to hone visual skills, including hand-eye coordination, eye tracking, and peripheral vision. By boosting these skills, the brain is able to quickly and efficiently process the messages sent to it by the eyes, and transmit these signals to the body.

Children and adults who cannot accurately gauge the velocity of a ball rushing toward them, or the distance between them and opposing players, are more prone to accidents on the field, resulting in concussions. Sports vision training mitigates this risk by providing athletes of all ages and abilities with the visual skills needed to react quickly. These same skills improve sports performance.

How Does a Concussion Affect Your Vision?

People who sustain a concussion, which is the most common form of brain injury, often experience dizziness, difficulty focusing, headaches and double vision. Sports vision training can help improve your visual skills by focusing on:

• Balance
• Light Sensitivity
• Depth Perception
• Dynamic Visual Acuity
• Eye Tracking
• Focusing
• Hand-Eye or Body-Eye Coordination
• Peripheral Awareness
• Reaction Time

How Can Vision Training Help Prevent a Concussion?

More than 50% of people with concussions (or post-concussion syndrome) experience visual problems like double vision and delayed eye tracking — the same visual skills an athlete needs to play safely and well. It’s not surprising, then, that concussed athletes are at greater risk of experiencing additional head injuries.

Sports vision training involves a personalized regimen of in-office and at-home visual exercises and scenarios to train the eyes, brain and body to work more efficiently, regardless of the sport. Athletes experience improved reaction times, speed and accuracy as a result.

Rather than simply hoping to avoid serious accidents on the field, take action and start a sports vision training program.

To learn more about how sports vision training can help prevent a concussion, or future ones, contact us at VUE Sports Vision Center to schedule an appointment with one of our sports vision experts.

VUE Sports Vision Center serves patients from , North York, Kitchener, and York, throughout Ontario.

When you think of the skills necessary to succeed at sports, speed, strength, agility, and endurance probably come to mind.

But have you considered how much we depend on visual skills to play sports? It’s no surprise that coaches tell their players to “Keep your eye on the ball” and “Look the ball into your glove.”

That’s because the visual system is the primary guide for the rest of the body to execute the physical actions needed in sports and every other aspect of life.

Some Visual Skills to Work On

Visual skills are a crucial component of a wide range of sports. Take tennis. You have to closely watch the ball from the second an opponent hits it to calculate the ball’s flight. That allows you to calculate where to plant your feet, how much to twist your torso, and where to position your arm in order to deliver the best counter strike.

Here are 5 visual skills used in sports, and tips for how you can improve them:

Dynamic visual acuity: being attentive to details in moving objects. As the baseball flies toward you, watch its spin to discern whether the pitch is a curveball (which dips down toward home plate) or a slider (which darts to the side and down).

Hand-eye coordination: the information seen and processed by the eyes and brain guides the movement of the hands. When a basketball teammate snaps a no-look pass your way, your hand-eye coordination is vital to see the ball’s approach and get your hands in position to catch it.

Eye tracking: the eyes moving together to follow an object. Watch a basketball from the second you release your jump shot until it drops through the hoop.

Peripheral vision: noticing objects at the edge of your visual field while looking straight ahead. To practice anticipating an opponent sneaking in to steal the basketball you’re dribbling, take notice during a simple walk on a city street. Is another pedestrian coming alongside you on the right? On the left?

Focus flexibility: adjusting focus between nearby and farther-away objects. This is key when playing table tennis and focusing on both the ball bouncing toward you and your opponent’s position across the net. Practice by strongly bouncing a tennis ball against a wall eight feet away, being alert to the precise spots each time the bounced ball hits the ground and the wall.

VUE Sports Vision Center provides sports-vision training, a customized program to help you process visual information and respond faster. We will conduct a vision evaluation, assess your visual skills, and design exercises to strengthen the visual skills you rely on. In follow-up appointments, Dr. Patrick Quaid, Dr. Hadassah Rutman, & Dr. Daniel Cunningham will monitor your progress.

VUE Sports Vision Center works on sports-vision techniques with athletes in Guelph, North York, Kitchener, York, and throughout Ontario.

Golf is a very visual sport, so if your visual skills are subpar, it will hurt your golf game. Sports vision training — individually prescribed exercises that develop specific visual skills and processing in athletes — can improve your game. Such training can be done off the course to hone putting, which is one of the most demanding strokes.

Putting, hitting a golf ball with a light stroke, requires intense concentration, calm under pressure, and a superb ability to read the greens: to understand how the closely-cropped grass near the hole will accelerate or slow, divert or escort a softly struck golf ball. Putting also demands knowing how far the ball must travel and precisely where on the club the ball should be tapped (the “sweet spot”).

Unfortunately, even golfers with 20/20 vision won’t succeed if their eyes don’t work in unison, or if they have poor eye-hand-body coordination. That’s where sports vision training comes into play.

Becoming a Tiger Woods or Jack Nicklaus is a tall order, but whether you’re a professional or an amateur golfer, sports vision training can make you a better golfer.

Improve Putting By Training Your Visual Skills

First and foremost, Dr. Patrick Quaid, Dr. Hadassah Rutman, & Dr. Daniel Cunningham of VUE Sports Vision Center will test your visual skills using a functional eye exam. This will include evaluating your hand-eye coordination, eye tracking, eye teaming (how the eyes work together), peripheral vision and ability to discern contrasts between colors. Dr. Patrick Quaid, Dr. Hadassah Rutman, & Dr. Daniel Cunningham will then prescribe a tailored program for your needs that will include in-office and at-home exercises in order to strengthen each skill.

How Can Sports Vision Training Improve Your Putting?

Customized sports vision training can help golfers:

• Analyze the ball’s location in relation to the hole
• Position the club so that its sweet spot lines up with the ball
• Conceive a strategy for hitting the ball to account for the distance, the greens, even the wind
• Convert that strategy into action with the club that delivers the ball into the hole

On a practical level, once golfers line up on the green to putt, they engage in a prolonged routine that’s almost never seen elsewhere on the course. Because they need to keep focusing on a close-by object and then shift their focus to the targeted destination, they repeatedly look back and forth between the ball at their feet and the hole.

This is known as focus flexibility, a technique that can be practiced at home by focusing on the floor tile near your toe, then on a dog-food dish (or other objects) located 15 feet away, then back on the tile, and so on. To practice depth perception, move from spot to spot and estimate each distance from the closest tile to the dog-food dish. To improve peripheral vision, focus on the tile while simultaneously attempting (and without changing the position of your head) to see the dog-food dish.

Visual Skills + Imagining Great Outcomes = Visualization

Sports vision training also involves a technique known as visualization, which is applicable to sports and to all areas of life. It involves closing your eyes and envisioning yourself taking each step necessary to execute a perfect putt. When you line up a putt in real life, those images will come to mind, ready to be applied step by step to attain success: sinking the putt.

Dr. Patrick Quaid, Dr. Hadassah Rutman, & Dr. Daniel Cunningham will develop a customized sports vision training plan to improve your putting and overall golf performance. VUE Sports Vision Center assists people just like you, from Guelph, North York, Kitchener, York and throughout Ontario.

References

• https://www.allaboutvision.com/sportsvision/skills.htm
• https://www.allaboutvision.com/sportsvision/treatment.htm
• https://www.aoa.org/optometrists/tools-and-resources/sports-and-performance-vision/visual-performance-assessment-and-training
• https://www.aoa.org/optometrists/tools-and-resources/sports-and-performance-vision
• https://www.aoa.org/optometrists/tools-and-resources/sports-and-performance-vision/spv-evaluations-and-comprehensive-eye-exams