How An Optometrist Can Help Improve Your Sports Game

Blog

Are you an athlete who struggles with your game? Well, there's every possibility that your vision is actually interfering with your athletic prowess -- and an optometrist who handles sports vision problems may be able to help.

Here's what you need to know about how visual acuity and vision therapy can affect your sports performance:

What's vision got to do with your athletic prowess?

Athletes actually make use of several different types of vision during an event. How much you rely on a given type of vision depends a lot on what sport you participate in, naturally, but the following are all considered important for athletes:

• Visual memory -- The ability to quickly process and recall complex arrangements of people and objects, like players in a field or strategic plays
• Eye tracking -- The ability to follow a ball or another player with your eyes, rather than moving your head along with the motion
• Dynamic visual acuity -- The ability to track a fast-moving object and respond to it as necessary
• Visual concentration -- The ability to mentally "tune out" visual noise and focus on what is important to your game
• Visual coordination -- This is the hand-eye coordination that is essential to almost any athlete's game
• Depth perception -- The ability to judge distances, which is especially important if you have to strike a ball or throw it any length of a field

A weakness in any one of these areas can cause your game to suffer.

How can an optometrist help?

Many optical boutiques offer vision therapy and other procedures that can help you improve your visual skills. Procedures like LASIK are surgical methods of reshaping the eye itself in order to improve vision as a whole—which may be enough to eliminate some problems athletes face in their game.

Vision therapy is another means of overcoming visual problems that interfere with an athlete's game. Vision therapy usually involves exercises that are designed to train the athlete's eye and enhance their visual skills. It can also be used to overcome problems like focusing problems and visual information and processing disorders. Much like any other part of the body, hand-eye coordination benefits from the right training techniques.

What should you do if you have questions?

The smart thing to do is make an appointment with an optical boutique to talk about the specific issues you notice that are interfering with your game. More than likely, the optometrist will have some specific recommendations and can work with you to overcome your current limitations.

Share

2 July 2019