Can Vision Therapy Improve Your Game?
Vision is one of the most important aspects in any sport. Athletes are constantly taking in and processing visual information that helps them be in the right place at the right time. Vision also determines timing, which is everything in sports! There are many visual aspects that all can be improved through a vision therapy program that can aid in an athletes success.
Here are a few ways vision therapy can help improve your game:
- Vision Therapy can improve stereopsis (or depth perception) – In order to see in depth, both our eyes have to be working together for our brain to receive visual stimuli to have proper depth perception. With sports, this is needed in order to quickly and accurately judge the distance and speed of objects. This is a skill that all athletes could benefit from!
- Vision Therapy can improve pursuits (or the ability to follow a moving object) – Almost every sport requires that you keep your eye on a ball and follow it no matter how fast it’s going so that you can be in the right place at the right time. This is a skill that all athletes could benefit from!
- Vision Therapy can improve saccades (or accurate eye movements) – This skill is important in team sports for scanning around to your teammates. Soccer players and basketball players would especially benefit from this skill!
- Vision Therapy can improve peripheral awareness – Peripheral awareness is important in sports in order to keep an eye on other players during team sports. This skill will also help you keep an eye on the field or court boundaries to ensure you don’t step out. Football players, soccer players, volleyball players, and basketball players would especially benefit from this skill!
- Vision Therapy can improve eye-hand coordination – Eye hand coordination is one of the most important skills in any sport. Through great eye hand coordination, you can use your eyes to effectively direct the movements of your hands or body during a game. Tennis players, golfers, and baseball players would especially benefit from this skill!
Difficulties in any of these areas will translate to difficulties on the field or court. Vision therapy not only helps with these important visual skills, but takes into account the stress and distractions that might be happening during a game. Under stress, visual skills may begin to break down. To account for this, we practice loading such as adding in a metronome, a balance board, or with multisensory integration to help with distractions such as loud fans. Vision therapy will also help with speed and accuracy so that visual skills can be developed to gather visual information as quickly as possible in order to allow more time for visual processing and reaction.
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