Throughout my career I’ve had the opportunity to work with athletes
from the PGA TOUR, LPGA TOUR, Major League Baseball, the NFL, professional
tennis and many in the collegiate and high school ranks. Whenever I work with
an athlete, they are always looking to have their vision give them an extra edge
and help them perform better at their sport.
Sports vision training allows athletes to use their vision
to enhance their performance. This week, I’d like to share my model for sports
vision training so people can begin to understand how improving their vision
truly does improve their game.
The first part of my model for sports vision training is
gaining an awareness of your own visual system.
In order to gain a greater understanding of your visual system, there
are several questions you need to answer: Are you left-or right-eye dominant?
How well do your eyes work as a team? Are you right-or left-handed? These
questions help to reveal important aspects about how your visual system works
and what you can do to improve your vision.
Once you have an understanding of your own visual system,
there are many tips that can help you better use your system to benefit your
performance. If you are right-eye dominant you will do a variety of activities
in sports very differently than if you are left-eye dominant. It affects how
you line up your eyes over a putt in golf, how you hit a backhand in tennis and
how you position yourself in the batter’s box for baseball or softball.
The final step is training and developing your visual
skills. Once you have learned about your vision, there are many different drills and exercises
you can do to enhance your vision.
Over the next few weeks I will share how you can test out
your own visual system, as well as drills and exercises to help develop your
own personal visual cues. Please
continue checking back each week as we begin to discuss how to optimize your
vision for success on and off the field.
Please feel free to ask any specific questions you have.