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Basketball
Answered by: Adam Clarin, OD
A: For court awareness I’d work on drills that incorporate peripheral and central vision, while adding in decision making processes, or cognitive load. Obviously with 10-year-olds you’ll need to start slow.
Simple drills can be made more “visual” with small changes. Having players call out the number of fingers you have up from different areas of the court while playing will help with visual awareness. They’ll need to be aware of the play and their teammates while looking at the coach - which forces them to keep their eyes up.
I also add vision drills to existing basketball drills such as dribbling and passing. You can start with a letter grid chart, known as a hart chart, while dribbling. The chart consists of random letters and numbers that require visual scanning. One thing I like to do with that chart is change the dribble sequence depending on the letter as they read through the chart. For example, if there’s a capital letter do a high dribble, lowercase is a low dribble, a number is a crossover, etc. This also works with multiple charts spread out to scan as you do the drill.
Spacing and timing are also important for basketball. I walk the court with the players while counting steps to determine different distances. How many steps from the baseline to the free-throw line? How many from the corner three to the basket? Then add timing. Ok it's 4 steps, can you cover that distance in 6 seconds? How about 3 or 10 seconds? Get them to appreciate space and time.
Another drill I like is to have a player stand on the free-throw line and look at the rim or backboard and keep their eyes on one place. Have four other players move around and without looking away have player at the free-throw call out which players moved and where they are on the court. This drill can really help visual-spatial awareness and memory.
The ISVA website features information on some of the most important visual skills for basketball. You can also check out the ISVA Find a Sports Vision & Performance Professional page and see if one of our members is in your area. Perhaps he/she would be willing to help you with some vision training exercises.
Hockey
Answered by: James M. Stringham, Ph.D.
Answered by: Joshua Watt, OD, FCOVD
Hockey is one of the fastest sports in the world. It is a dynamic game that demands visual precision, and intense concentration and awareness of what is happening around you. Failing to accurately perceive and process the visual cues around you can result in mental or physical error and more importantly, a serious injury.
Hockey is a sport of almost constant motion for players and the puck. So, to help enhance your performance, having well-developed dynamic acuity (ability to maintain visual clarity when players and/or puck are in motion) is just as significant as good static acuity (smallest detail that can be distinguished in a stationary target/setting, like the boards or the goal).
For forwards, wings, and defensive players, enhancing visual skills can help them make more accurate passes, win more face-offs, avoid hits, improve puck deflection abilities, develop better shot accuracy, and achieve greater hockey sense. For goalies, it can help improve puck and player tracking skills as well as hand-eye (eye-hand and eye-body) coordination, better their ability to read and react to the play, increase peripheral vision to read a shooter's cues, and reduce eye fatigue in high-pressure situations, leading to higher save percentages. Click here for some of the most important visual skills for hockey.
I tend to favor a team approach when it comes to sports vision training. Optometrists and Ophthalmologists with expertise in sports vision assessment and training, along with other professionals such as athletic trainers, and coaches can work together to be part of your performance enhancement team. ISVA offers a Sports Vision & Performance Professional Locator listing of its members. You can search by provider or location.
Nutrition
Answered by: James M. Stringham, Ph.D.
High-level visual performance doesn’t always line up with overall physical fitness…in fact, even among professional athletes, there is a wide range of capability for measures such as visual processing speed /reaction time, contrast sensitivity, and visual performance in glare. Most people believe that this range must be due primarily to variability in visual acuity – in other words, some athletes just need their vision corrected with eyeglasses or contacts.
Interestingly, however, even after refractive correction (i.e., glasses or contacts), many athletes still struggle with the above performance measures. The reason? Vision is not solely optical in nature – there is a substantial contribution to vision by neural tissues – the retina and brain. In other words, no matter how well-focused an image is, it must be processed by the retina (in the back of the eye) and sent to the brain for further processing to ultimately produce visual experience.
So, what can you do to improve the processing of the retina and brain? Provide these tissues with the special nourishment that they require – nutrients that, if consumed in adequate amounts, accumulate in high concentrations in neural tissues that serve vision. Specifically, the micronutrients lutein, zeaxanthin, and meso-zeaxanthin have been found to have significant, meaningful effects on performance-related visual metrics. These nutrients are found in dark, leafy-green vegetables and other colored fruits and vegetables – foods that we typically don’t get enough of on a consistent basis.
And consistency is the key here, placebo-controlled studies have shown that consistent, daily supplementation with these nutrients produce dramatic, significant improvements in visual processing speed, reaction time, vision in glare, and contrast sensitivity. There is now a wealth of data from the past 25 years to support the use of these nutrients to improve visual and cognitive health and performance; some of the study populations have included athletes and high-level military personnel. Carbs, fats, and protein are macronutrients, and can certainly produce energy and muscle. But the magic is in the micronutrients lutein, zeaxanthin, and meso-zeaxanthin.
You can learn more about sports nutrition for your eyes here.
Racquet Sports
Answered by: Alan Reichow, OD, MEd, FAAO
To determine the best lens color in any sport with a moving target, like the racquet sports, it's important to consider the colors of BOTH the ball and background as we want the ball to "Pop" visually. Certain lens colors cause the ball to blend into the background reducing the "Pop". With the varied ball, net, court and surrounding colors in the racquet sports there is no single "Best Color Lens to See the Ball", but research has shown that blocking harsh blue light increases ball clarity and contrast in most settings.
Performance tints incorporated into single-use soft contact lenses, whether with vision correction or not, eliminates many compromising issues of eyewear. By eliminating all peripheral light leakage, such lenses block 100% UV, virtually all the Blue Light ("Visual Noise"), fully immerse the user in the tint, and improve visual comfort, clarity and contrast. Such lenses are available with Amber designed for most target tracking sports, such as baseball, football and soccer, and Grey-Green for activities in diverse environments such as golf, water sports and hiking. Due to the varied color combinations of target vs. background in racquet sports, Amber is preferred more often, both outdoors and indoors, while Grey-Green is chosen by some. If you experience light sensitivity when playing your sport, full immersion in either of these tints has been reported by many athletes, eye doctors and athletic trainers to provide relief.
Answered by: Alireza Somji, OD
A baseline sports vision assessment test is fairly uniform amongst most sports. Customization comes more in training programs based on the different visual needs between sports. Since the shuttlecock is one of the fastest recorded moving objects in sports with speeds up to 300mph, the ability to keep the eyes steady at your opponent's point of contact will allow for better tracking as it crosses the net. The trajectory and visual anticipation required to determine the location of the shuttlecock will be different to the trajectory of a basketball or baseball, so we would incorporate more visual tracking, anticipation, eye-hand coordination, and timing drills.
For testing, we would consider an oculomotor tracking system (such as RightEye) and technology such as the Senaptec Sensory Station to measure reaction time, inhibition, perception and several other skills important in badminton.
Answered by: Jarrod Davies, OD, FCOVD
While pickleball and tennis have some similarities, there are certainly a lot of differences as well. While tennis has more movement and large muscle coordination to run the court, pickleball is more about quick movements around your body. Since you are playing in an area much smaller than a tennis court, and usually playing doubles, there is less push to run to the ball.
In addition, the majority of play is done at the kitchen line with you only standing 14-feet away from your opponent. A volley in tennis hit at 75 miles per hour (an average hit for a professional tennis player), would take approximately 709 milliseconds to travel the court length of 78 feet. Obviously, movement has to be precise and predicted to get to the ball in this situation. Players must visually recognize motion patterns of their opponent to accurately predict where the ball will be placed on the court.
Consider now that the pickleball games shorter distance of play can change this reaction time. A hard volley at the kitchen line hit at 40 miles per hour (a speed that can be achieved by most intermediate players) takes only 238 milliseconds to reach a 14-foot distance. This is almost three times as fast as the tennis volley. Reaction time is obviously important and can be trained using sports vision techniques like strobe lenses. In addition, peripheral awareness to understand player positioning, pursuit and saccadic eye movements, and general eye hand coordination would all benefit the pickleball player.
Research
Answered by: Greg Appelbaum, Ph.D.
There is a small, but growing, body of research showing that visual training can improve athletic performance. As reviewed in Laby and Appelbaum (2021), 16 articles have addressed vision training interventions and their effects on sports performance through analysis of changes in on-field statistical production. The majority of these studies have addressed batting sports such as baseball and cricket. While the types of design have varied, over half of the studies showed statistically significant improvements for individuals who underwent vision training interventions indicating that the intervention contributed to improved on-field performance.
Reference: Laby, D. & Appelbaum, L.G. (2021) Vision and On-field Performance: A Critical Review of Visual Assessment and Training Studies with Athletes. Optometry and Vision Science. 98(7):723-731
Soccer
Answered by: Alireza Somji, OD
Absolutely not! While goalkeepers are the most obvious position on a soccer team that can benefit from eye-hand coordination and reaction training, sports vision and visual performance training incorporates many other skills. Examples include split attention, near-far speed, scanning and searching visual information, visually driven decision making and many other skills. Click here for more on some of the most dynamic skills associated with soccer.
Each position on a soccer pitch has unique visual and cognitive demands. For example, midfielders are constantly in motion and searching and scanning their visual field for opposition players and where they can move the ball for the next pass. Dynamic vision abilities are critical. On the other hand, defenders generally play the game at a slower pace and have a larger field of vision to analyze. Distance depth perception, visual anticipation and many other skills are more important for this position and require different visual performance training protocols.
Every player and every position in a soccer team can benefit from a well-designed sports vision training program! You can use the ISVA “Find a Sports Performance Professional” locator to see if there is a Sports Vision and Performance specialist in your area.
Sports Vision Exams, Testing, and Eyewear Information
Answered by: Graham Erickson, OD, FAAO, FCOVD
Many of the visual demands in sports require discrimination of information that is moving quickly, such as judging the speed and trajectory of a baseball. Stroboscopic visual training is a form of training in which an individual practices a task under intermittent visual conditions with the intention of enhancing subsequent performance under normal visual conditions. This is similar to other forms of "resistance" training, such as sprinting with a parachute to add physical resistance to a sport task.
When athletes use this visual "resistance" training tool, the lenses alternate between clear and opaque vision which is called strobing. The strobe sequences (which are adjustable, based on the athletes’ specific sport needs and skill level), remove critical visual information, forcing the brain to process visual information more quickly and efficiently. By doing so, the wearer is trained to become more efficient with the reduced amount of visual information they are given to achieve success with a sport-specific task (for example, one-touch passing/striking drills in soccer). This heightened visual capability enhances visual attention, coordination, anticipation, and decision-making, resulting in faster reaction times, better ability to focus, and overall visual processing.
Answered by: Frederick R. Edmunds, OD, FAAO
I first suggest that the athlete first talk with his/her eye care professional about the best eyewear option for his/her chosen sport and individual needs. Research suggests that contact lenses provide some benefits over glasses while playing sports.
Different sports offer different levels of injury risk, but no matter the sport and no matter the eyewear option used for everyday wear, wearing the appropriate protective sports eyewear is as important as putting on other protective gear such as helmets and pads. Everyday dresswear eyeglasses, sunglasses, and contact lenses alone don’t offer adequate protection to guard against potential eye injuries and can make an injury worse. More than 90% of sports- and recreation-related eye injuries can be prevented by using appropriate eye and facial protection.1
Sports protective eyewear should be properly fit by an Eye Care Professional. This is particularly important for children. Protective sports eyewear should be designed and manufactured to meet or exceed applicable US (ASTM) impact protection standards. These standards best determine the eyewear’s ability to help prevent an ocular injury in consideration of the unique elements of play and equipment associated with a particular sport. All protective sports eyewear must have polycarbonate lenses, a type of plastic that’s designed to withstand impact, and protect eyes from ultraviolet rays. Regular eyeglasses have only 4 to 5 percent of the impact resistance of polycarbonate of comparable thickness.
Fortunately, there are stylish options available today that don’t look like the protective eyewear of old. For more information on what you need to know about protective eyewear, please refer to ISVA’s Protect. Prevent. Play. program.
- Miller, K et al. Pediatric Sports- and Recreation-Related Eye Injuries Treated in US Emergency Departments, Pediatrics, February 2018 https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/141/2/e20173083
Answered by: Jennifer Stewart, OD
A: Sports Vision testing, or visual performance evaluation, is quite different and more extensive than a typical eye exam and is should be done in addition to (and not as a substitute for) a comprehensive eye exam. Ideally, a visual performance evaluation should be performed by an eye doctor who specializes in this area. There are a number of tests that a sports vision eye doctor can conduct to help identify and address your visual strengths and weaknesses.
For example, peak athletic performance in many sports depends largely on your ability to see and react quickly to objects, such as hitting a baseball, catching a pass, returning a tennis serve or stopping a puck. Some tests can assess how fast you react after you first see an object. By administering a comprehensive visual performance evaluation , your sports vision doctor can evaluate how quickly you can process and react to visual information. Based on this, he/she can prescribe specific exercises to help you develop faster reaction times and improved hand-eye coordination. For more information on some of the visual skills your sports vision eye care doctor can evaluate, click here.
Volleyball
Answered by: Alexandar Andrich, OD, FCOVD
Knowing where you are on the volleyball court is vital to making a good play on the ball. The athlete often has a split second to make a decision on whether or not to play the ball or let it go out of bounds defensively. Offensively, the player must know where the blockers are and where the defensive players are while in the air and preparing to spike the ball. Vision skills play a key role in making these decisions.
In volleyball, players rotate into 6 different positions. 3 positions in the front row and 3 positions in the back row. While in the back row, defensive players must have excellent peripheral awareness. This visual skill is called Central Peripheral Integration. Knowing where you are located on the court compared to the boundary lines helps the player decide on whether a spike or a serve will go out of bounds. Offensive players in the front row must utilize a vision skill called Multiple Object Tracking. The spiker must keep track of where their setter is on the court along with the blockers and defensive players. Having this visual awareness allows the player to make a more accurate spike to avoid getting blocked or dug.
Volleyball players will train their muscles, speed, and agility. However, to be at the top, that is not always enough. Training the visual system offers a tremendous opportunity for a competitive edge.