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What Is Sports Vision Training and Enhancement?

Volleyball sports Vision Enhancement

Matt Fuerbringer Doing Motion-Vision Enhancement Exercises with our own Ryan Harrison

Vision Therapy for Sports Performance

Sports Vision Training isn’t about correcting your vision. You wear glasses or contacts for that. Vision Therapy is about training (or retraining) the brain to achieve maximum efficiency in the way it processes and responds to visual inputs.

Sports Vision is about training people with excellent vision to process and respond to what they see faster and better. Using a personalized and customized series of techniques and exercises, the brain learns to respond more accurately and efficiently. It’s just like muscle memory. Once you know and refine exactly how to react, you can do it, again and again, getting better every time.

An athlete on the top of his or her game needs neuro-visual responses that are dynamic, precise, and fully aligned every time, all of the time.

Sports Vision Enhancement in Laguna Beach, between Los Angeles and San Diego

Slow The Game Down is a unique vision therapy program designed specifically for athletes. Based out of Laguna Beach, we provide player development program specializing in methods, tools and techniques that enable athletes to consistently get into a High-Performancee Focus--- a unique process than enables individuals to maximize the coordination of their eyes, mind and body to reach the highest level of personal potential possible.

Dr. Bill Harrison: the Grandfather of Sports Vision

For over 30 years, Dr. Bill Harrison, a renowned sports performance specialist, has been utilizing the sports world as a performance laboratory for analyzing, testing and creating a methodology to help athletes develop the skills that can create champions. He found he was able to help athletes develop the heightened visual awareness that seems to be the key to unlocking the door that allows them entrance into "The Zone." This performance laboratory including work with great athletes such as George Brett, Jason Giambi, Shawn Green, Greg Maddux, Jim Colbert, Billy Casper, the Miller family (Reggie, Cheryl and Darrell), Jennie Finch and many others. Through the utilization of Internet technology, Dr. Harrison's methodology is now available to anyone and everyone seeking to achieve success on the sports field.

We provide Sports Vision Enhancement and Training for Los Angeles, San Diego and all of Southern California.

Dr. Bill Harrison talks sports vision enhancement with the likes of MLB Hall of Famer George Brett

Hear an Interview with Dr. Harrison Discussing Sports Vision and Top Baseball Athletes

Visual Processing is How Sport is Played

Vision is way more than how well you read off a chart. Having 20/20 vision doesn’t count for much if you can’t properly track a ball with your eyes, or anticipate where your opponent is headed. If you can’t intercept the play and turn it around, how are you going to succeed?

Sport is all about the visual. The eye sees, the brain interprets and leads, and the body follows. Coaches, athletes, and pundits alike need to keep in mind that visual processing our brain does is prone to fumbles. Incorrect, incorrect, or poorly timed responses are what hold back good athletes from becoming great ones. Even with the best coaching and tactics, sports performance can suffer if not properly honed. Bad habits need to be reversed, while positive skills need to be nurtured. This is what sports vision is all about.

The visual system summarizes what is seen, then tells the brain to activate the muscles to execute a motor action. Vision directs the intelligent movement of the body (the eyes lead the body). The more accurate the visual system can take in and process visual information, the more accurate it can direct appropriate motor movement.

Football Sports Vision Enhancement Laguna Beach, LA, San Diego

What Happens When our Visual System is Inaccurate?

  • Ball not always seen clearly
  • Over or under-estimating the distance of the ball
  • Difficulty making the “shot,” “pass” or “play”
  • Performance in competition deteriorates late in the game or under stress
  • Prone to repeating similar mistakes again and again
  • Inconsistent performance
  • Fatigue

You CAN optimize, correct, and enhance your visual skills through training! Be the athlete you know you can be.

tennis sports vision enhancement near San Diego and Los Angeles

Schedule A Sports Vision Appointment

Sports Vision Training Enhances the Following Skills:

tennis sports vision enhancement Los Angeles and San Diego

Dr. Harrison helping tennis players up their game

  • eye tracking and movement precision
  • enhanced peripheral awareness
  • target localization
  • visual discrimination
  • faster, more accurate hand-eye coordination
  • vision-balance integration
  • visual reaction time
  • visualization
  • depth perception
  • distance estimation

The Research on Sports Vision Enhancement

Improved Batting Averages

A study of the University of Cincinnati baseball team showed drastic improvement in the batting averages of players following six weeks of various kinds of vision training. The team batting average went up 34 points from the previous season, exceeding improvements of other N.C.A.A. teams. Errors decreased by 15 percent, while fielding assists increased 8 percent. Across all tracked batting parameters, vision training showed improvements of 10% or more.

Another study conducted out of the University of California Riverside tested the effects of Vision Training on real-life applications with their own college baseball team. The athletes on their baseball team were able to improve by 30 percent their reading of eye charts — as well as their batting averages — after completing more than two dozen 25-minute vision training sessions using a computer program. According to the study “trained players showed improved vision after training, had decreased strike-outs, and created more runs”.

Vision Training Works For All Sports

Numerous studies have tracked the benefit of Vision Training for Athletes from many different sports. Some of the sports that have shown improvement in performance are: Hockey, Table Tennis, and Golf, Rugby, Soccer, Tennis. For sports with rapid movements, the athletes who have undergone sports vision training have a significant advantage over their competition.

Summary About Vision Training:

  • 20/20 is NOT enough! Just having “normal” 20/20 eyesight and decent eye-hand coordination are not enough to maintain consistent superior athletic performance during practice or “peak” performances.
  • Why sports performance suffers: Most sports rely heavily on visual impact. The eye leads and the body follows. Many athletes don’t realize that their visual systems give inaccurate and/or incomplete information causing their performance to be lower than their potential.
  • Superior athletes require a highly precise and aligned visual system to be accurate EVERY time.Even with excellent coaching, practice and knowledge of the game, sports performance can be below potential with an inefficient visual system. The visual abilities needed to excel in sports are learned skills that can be enhanced, while bad visual habits can be unlearned.

UCLA Volleyball sports vision enhancement

Dr. Harrison working on sports vision for volleyball with UCLA athletes

Schedule A Sports Vision Appointment

*Also ask us about how we can help protect your vision against Blue Light!