HOW are you seeing?
You can read the bottom line of
the eyesight chart with ease and can spot umpires’ mistakes from 100 metres away, so your vision is perfect right? Well maybe not and it might be limiting your performance. iMPROVe talked to sports vision specialist Gavin Rebello to find out more...
First of all, it’s worth thinking about
what a complex job your eyes, and indeed your whole visual system, perform on a hockey field – often under considerable physical stress. “Your eyes tell you where the ball is in space,” says Gavin. “They will lock onto the ball and follow the ball by the movement of the eye muscles. The brain gets all that information and starts predicting when that ball will arrive in your hockey-stick space – so then your hand-eye coordination starts to come into play. “What we find with a lot of athletes is that their performance can reduce when they are stressed or dehydrated or when they become fatigued. And that’s partly the usual physiological things but we are also finding that it’s their eye muscles are no different to any other muscle in the body – they can become fatigued as well. “So if you are tracking the ball and one of your eye muscles is slightly more sluggish than another then you are going to be slightly delayed in your ability to follow the ball and you will be slightly late on your timing.” On top of all that ball
watching your visual system also has the job of telling you where you are in space relative to your team mates and opposition – so you know where that all-important gap is on the field ready for you to run into, or through which to make that perfect pass.
To assess how your visual system is
performing all these complex tasks there are specialist tests that go far beyond the static eyechart. And the good news is that, if problems are identified, there are ways of sorting them out. A steady stream of high-profile sports
men and women come to Gavin for his specialist testing and treatment. Among them are Britain’s number one skier Chemmy Alcott and GB and England hockey player Chloe Rogers, who, for one, sailed through the tests. “To be performing at Chloe’s sort of standard obviously there has to be something firing right,” says Gavin. In fact Chloe’s results were so
good Gavin is now using them as a benchmark for other hockey players.
“I’m working with Chelmsford – who didn’t quite make promotion last season but who are going all-out for promotion this year [to the women’s premier division]. I’ve screened the whole team and there are four or five athletes I am working with to bring there visual systems up to speed. “For example, one player had regular contact lenses from a local opticians and they were fine, but on the hockey field one lens wasn’t as fired up as it
could be and that affected her timing
– so we just improved that a little bit.” When working with sports teams like
Chelmsford and another of his clients Northampton Cricket Club, Gavin has a mobile screening kit with ten tests. About 20% of athletes are generally found to be under-performing visually and these are called in-house to his Essex practice for further testing. And the treatments? There are options
like high-performance contact lenses, techniques to improve tear-fluid function (watering eyes in, say, windy conditions can degrade performance) and vision training exercises. Vision training is usually designed
Oliver Rogers
to be incorporated into an athlete’s normal gym sessions but, says Gavin, working with eye muscles is a little different to the conditioning of other muscles. “With your quads or your hamstrings you will go down to the gym and get them to work stronger and stronger. With eye muscles it is all about balance. “There are six muscles around your eyes. So if you picture the corners of your eyes in the horizontal plane at 3 o’clock and 9 o’clock there are two muscles there, one on the inner nose and one near your ear. Those muscles actually work as a team. If you are looking towards the nose the medial rectus will pull tight and the other muscle near your temple, the lateral rectus, needs to relax. You actually don’t want all the muscles to be really strong because the eye won’t move efficiently – you need balance. It’s about finding what a player needs and then prescribing to those needs.”
For more see
www.sports-vision.co.uk Benchmark – Chloe Rogers undergoes a tinted lens test from Gavin Rebello
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