You wouldn't send a marathon runner to the weight room for powerlifting

🎯 You wouldn’t send a marathon runner to the weight room for powerlifting – so why train all athletes as if they see the world the same way? It’s time we rethink visual training in sport.

When most of us think about training for a sport, the first things that come to mind are physical aspects such as strength, speed and agility, or the technical aspects such as a performance of a particular skill. We naturally accept that the physical demands of, say, a rugby player, differ vastly from those of a marathon runner, and the technical demands of shooting a basketball differ from those needed to hit a hockey ball. But what about the demands on an athlete’s visual system? Just as no two sports have identical physical or technical requirements, the visual skills needed to excel also vary significantly from one sport to another.

It’s easy to assume that good eyesight alone is enough, but that’s far from the truth. Visual performance in sport goes well beyond 20/20 vision. In fact, depending on the sport, different aspects of vision become critical. You can imagine, for example, that in hockey, players often rely heavily on skills like peripheral awareness, fast saccadic eye movements, and coincidence anticipation – the ability to predict when a moving object will arrive at a certain location. In contrast, a target sport like golf might place far more emphasis on static visual acuity and depth perception.

This difference in visual demands is well-supported by the scientific literature. Research by Laby et al. (2011) found that Olympic athletes from different sports displayed significantly different profiles of visual abilities. For instance, they noted that archers tend to have worse stereoacuity (depth perception) than footballers, while softball players showed superior contrast sensitivity at higher spatial frequencies compared to athletes in speed skating and track and field. Similarly, Burris et al. (2020) found that athletes in interceptive sports such as tennis and baseball displayed better visual clarity, contrast sensitivity, and reaction time, while athletes in more strategic sports like soccer demonstrated higher spatial working memory.

It is unclear, however, why the researchers chose to test these particular visual skills at the expense of others. Do a brief search of the literature on Google Scholar and you will find well over 20 different visual skills mentioned in relation to sporting performance. It is extremely rare that a researcher (or applied practitioner) would be given the time or opportunity to test all of these on a group of elite athletes. And that is before we even consider whether we have any accessible and validated measures for doing so.

I am one of the fortunate ones, in that I have developed my own visual screening which manages to incorporate 15 different visual skills and have run this same screening on over 500 elite athletes, from over 20 different sports, giving me normalised data from which to compare the performance of others. But this database has taken me over 20 years to build-up along with access to some of the best athletes in the world. Most practitioners and researchers do not have this luxury to be able to do such a comprehensive, generic screening. Instead, most research, particularly in elite sport, gives minimal contact time with the athletes so knowing what to test to get the best use of that time is vital.

Currently, researchers seem to select their testing based on what equipment they have available to them. I can’t knock this – I have been there myself! But is this a good scientific rationale? Absolutely not. So if we cannot test everything, but need a good rationale for what we do test, where do we go from there?

This is where my recent research paper comes in. I have developed a screening tool to allow for a better understand which visual skills are perceived as important – designed to be completed by those who are actively involved in the sport. It is simple and cheap to use. I validated it using field hockey participants and have since gone on to use it in other sports too. Is it perfect, no. But does it provide a rationale for the testing phase which is currently lacking in nearly all sports vision research, yes.

If you would like to read the full article, you can do so here. Or come back later this week when I will add a blog on the different aspects of vision required for hockey (that emerged from this paper, and from my own experience of playing hockey for a lifetime and working with the Team GB hockey squad for two Olympic cycles).