 |
Baseball / Softball |
VISUAL PERFORMANCE IN
BASEBALL/SOFTBALL"Keep your eye on the ball" "Look the ball into your glove" Sometimes that's easier said than done! The ability to track a 90 mph fastball depends on excellent dynamic visual acuity, depth perception, and visual pursuit skills. The ability of the pitcher to release the ball to the plate properly with the correct speed and spin requires excellent vision, near-to-far focusing and eye/hand/body coordination. We feel under game conditions, vision training ranks right up there with weight training and conditioning. The very best players are said to have a "great field of vision." The receiver that drops the pass, the batter that strikes out, and the unsuccessful free throw shooter; all may have 20/20 vision, but chances are they lack in one or more critical visual skill areas which may in fact reduce their performance. If the visual information is inaccurate, it can throw off the body's timing and cause the performance level to drop. However, vision skills - like all physical skills - can be taught, trained, practiced, and perfected. Sports vision testing and training as well as the typical mainstream training regimens, have helped many amateur and professional athletes significantly improve their competitive performance. POTENTIAL FOR MAJOR IMPROVEMENT
Professional and amateur athletes are remarkably skillful at adapting to their vision problems and level of vision skills. Some assume that everyone sees the way they do. Others have good vision skills that enable them to play well but, if sharpened, could help them play even better. Simply, it's a matter of how good they are, compared to how good they could be. There is no question that sports vision training can help improve performance. In the past, it was assumed that an athlete either had good visual skills or not, and nothing could be done to improve on that natural ability. However, in the last decade, the International Academy of Sports Vision and the American Optometric Association, recognizing that superior visual skills correlated with superior performance, worked with optometric researchers to develop a battery of tests and training procedures that are used to evaluate and improve the athletes' visual skill levels. While an absolute cause and effect relationship has not been defined, it is our premise that visual performance is one of the critical factors in the complex equation that defines sports performance and endeavor to correct any observed deficits in visual performance to the highest level possible, using the tools of modern medicine. The visual assessment and enhancement program is one component of a large performance equation which has many complex and interacting variables. To attempt to isolate the factors or identify a primary "factor" is naive at this time. However, to ignore any assessable and modifiable factors that may effect performance is equally naive.
|
