Sports Vision Training

By admin •  Updated: 07/20/16 •  2 min read

One of the areas I’ve become interested in recently is sports vision training. It makes perfect sense that training your eyes is just as important as training any other part of your body. I brought my son to work with Dr. Ross McKay in Westmont, Illinois. Here are my takeaways.

Sports vision training is important for teaching and improving skills like ball tracking, hand-eye coordination and reaction time.

IMG_3794The system that he uses utilizes a large touchscreen monitor with exercises that exam in and measure the participants skills in this area. The participant stands in front of the screen and does a variety of one and two-handed exercises that measure speed, accuracy and identification in these vision training exercises. One impressive feature is it divides the screen screen into quadrants and measures your vision for each quadrant separately.

IMG_3807 Dr. McKay takes each client through an initial vision assessment and will measure results against those baseline measurements. The assessment also checks for any vision issues that may need to be checked with an eye doctor before going through this training. The entire session introductory session took 45 minutes. Sessions in the future will be faster because exercises will not be need to be explained.

IMG_3810Once the participant goes through the touch screen exercises and Dr. McKay analyzes the results, the participant is then given some other drills that work on the participants vision deficits. In this picture, my son is working with the strobe glasses and focusing on catching a ball while in his catcher’s squat. He also did a similar drill while in his hitting stance.

This training is also useful for other sports. The program is customizable for various sports vision training applications like hockey goalie training or foot-eye coordination for soccer players. Dr. McKay also mentioned that there are applications for this type of training for athletes who have suffered concussion or deal with ADHD.

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