How Can Sports Vision Therapy Improve Athlete Performance?

How Can Sports Vision Therapy Improve Athlete Performance?

To improve your performance in sports, you require determination, a positive attitude, and maximum effort. If your vision skills are lacking, giving 100 percent will not always yield the best results. You cannot be physically fit if you are not visually fit.

What Is Sports Vision Therapy?

Do you feel like your athletic performance is not measuring up to your athletic abilities? If so, you may be lacking some visual skills. Sports vision therapy works on improving an athlete’s visual abilities to achieve excellence in sports.

Vision involves more than how well people can see. It involves several visual skills that allow for precise, smooth, and accurate eye movements for comfortable and clear vision. These skills are necessary for many activities, including sports. They allow people to visualize, switch visual focus between target points, use their peripheral vision, track a moving target, and more.

Signs That a Vision Problem Is Affecting Your Sports Performance

Reduced performance in any visual skill may cause some difficulty while participating in sports activities. Some of the warning signs to watch out for include:

• You have trouble remembering plays.

• You have a strong dislike of team sports.

• Even with lots of practice, you are not noticing any improvements.

• You have a diminished interest in sports.

• Although you have strong athletic skills, your performance in sports is quite poor.

• You tend to underestimate or overestimate distances.

• You struggle to track other players or the ball.

• You find it difficult to throw or catch.

Visual Skills Necessary for High-Quality Sports Performance

Most sports activities require speed and accuracy for peak performance. Reduced visual skills can make it difficult to participate in many sports activities. They may even cause low self-esteem or poor self-image. Some of the visual skills you need for optimal athletic performance include:

• Eye-tracking.

• Eye-hand coordination.

• Depth performance.

• Dynamic visual acuity.

• Visual concentration.

• Visual memory.

• Peripheral vision.

• Visual reaction time.

• Eye focusing.

• Visualization.

How Can Sports Vision Therapy Help?

Most binocular vision issues stem from problems within the connections between the eyes and the brain. Others result from the way the brain processes visual information from the eyes. If you have a vision problem, vision therapy will help you retrain your visual system to develop and improve your vision skills.

You can look at vision therapy as the science of achieving a comfortable and clear vision. Sports vision therapy is a fully customized program designed to strengthen athletes’ visual skills and retrain their eye-brain connections. The treatment aims to help athletes interpret visual input with increased ease and accuracy.

Most of the perceptual input in sports is visual. Even if you have 20/20 vision, your sporting performance may still be lacking. Sports vision therapy aims to separate high-performing athletes from the rest. It boosts athletic performance by improving several visual skills such as eye-hand coordination, peripheral vision, dynamic visual acuity, visual reaction time, visual tracking, and others.

To learn more about sports vision therapy, visit Bernstein Center for Visual Performance at our office in White Plains, New York. You can also call (914) 682-8886 today to schedule an appointment.