Sports vision training works on enhancing an athlete’s vision abilities to take their game to the next level. At Academy of Vision and Learning, we create individualized training plans on a sport-specific basis to build visual skills based on the sport vision assessment.

The visual skills necessary for peak athletic performance in many sports are:

• Dynamic Visual Acuity – If you are playing a sport like racquetball, tennis, soccer or hockey, you need to be able to clearly see objects while you and/or the objects are moving fast. Without good dynamic visual acuity, you will have a difficult time in sports like these.
• Visual Concentration – the ability to screen out these distractions and stay focused on the object or the target.
• Eye Tracking – the ability to “keep your eye on the ball.” Eye tracking helps you maintain better balance and quickly react to the situation.
• Focusing – the ability to change focus from one object to another quickly and clearly. 
• Visual Memory – the ability to process and remember a fast-moving, complex picture of people and things. This is called visual memory. The athlete with good visual memory always seems to be in the right place at the right time
• Visualization – picturing yourself doing it can help you do it. Through visualization, you see yourself performing well in your “mind’s eye” while your eyes are concentrating on something else, usually the ball. Using scanning techniques, researchers have found that the same areas of the brain that light up during performance also are at work when you visualize the performance.
• Peripheral Vision – the ability to see things out of the corner of your eye. Much of what happens in sports does not happen directly in front of you. Therefore, increasing your ability to see action to the side without having to turn your head is important.
• Visual Reaction Time – how quickly a person perceives an anticipated visual event and how quickly they can react to that stimulus. If you can’t quite return that tennis serves, you need to improve your visual reaction time, or the speed with which your brain interprets and reacts to your opponent’s action.
• Depth Perception – the ability to quickly and accurately judge the distance and speed of objects. In racket sports, depth perception enables you to quickly and accurately judge the distance between yourself, the ball, your opponents, teammates, boundary lines and other objects. If you consistently over- or underestimate the distance to your target, poor depth perception may be the reason.
• Balance – the ability to stay upright or stay in control of body movement. Vision and balance are directly related.
• Contrast Sensitivity – the ability of the visual system to distinguish between an object and its background

For example, a training program for a tennis player will emphasize eye-hand coordination and dynamic visual acuity whereas a program for a golfer will concentrate on visual alignment and depth perception to see the breaks in the greens.

We can predict the athlete’s performance based on our findings from a vision assessment.  If you are having trouble getting to the next level in your sport even after stepping up your practice, you might have a visual problem limiting your success.

Interested? Request an appointment. We are happy to help you to achieve your goal.

Eye Protection for Sports

The American Optometric Association’s Sports Vision Section and Safe Kids Worldwide strongly recommend the use of protective eyewear for most sports. Each year, hospital emergency rooms treat more than 40,000 sports-related eye injuries. More than one-third of the victims are children.

In fact, sports represent the number one cause of eye injuries in children under the age of sixteen. The sports with the highest risk — for which eye protection is available — include basketball, baseball, hockey, football, lacrosse, fencing, paintball, water polo, racquetball, soccer and downhill skiing. It is estimated that more than 90 percent of these injuries could be prevented simply by wearing proper helmets or goggles.