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Workouts for Your Eyes
You train almost every other part of your body, so why not your eyes?
Sharpen your vision with these techniques; we guarantee your athletic
performance will improve.
By Ryan Brandt
MANY OF US DO LITTLE MORE to keep
our eyes in shape than roll them at Bill
O'Reilly. But proper eye function can
make or break your day: It allows you to
return a 100-mile-an-hour tennis serve,
hold the best line through a mogul run,
and keep your balance while hiking a
steep trail. For most people, nothing short
of surgery will return 20/20 eyesight, but
the growing field of sports-vision research
can help fine-tune and flex the nine
muscles that power your peepers—the
three inside the eye that help you focus,
and the six outside it, which control
direction and scan. It's worth the effort:
Vision training improves balance,
peripheral vision, recognition speed, and
reflexes.
Sight club: Tennis pro Andy
Roddick's orbs are off the
charts. (Torsten
Blackwood/AFP/Getty)
Not surprisingly, the brain plays a major
role in all this. In stressful situations—like running Class V rapids or
riding a snowboard through trees—peripheral vision goes haywire,
taking depth perception and speed with it. This also causes a
breakdown in the vestibular system, the part of the brain that handles
balance. Essentially, when the eyes get too much alarming information
at once, short-circuiting is one of the body's defense mechanisms:
Visual information that should pass through this system instead rushes
straight to the brain cells in charge of sparking your motor skills and
thus your reflexes.
"Your vision system practically shuts down," says Burton Worrell, 61, a
San Jose, California–based optometrist who, among other things, has
helped batters on the San Francisco Giants do a better job picking up
on the spin of a curveball.
Fortunately, you can learn to tap right back in to that data pipeline.
Worrell's latest ocular regimen (see "Rapid Eye Movement") grew out
of his groundbreaking research with college baseball teams, including
the University of California–Berkeley. Over a 12-week period, players
who practiced Worrell's vision drills improved their batting averages by
43 points—an increase that can spell the difference between a minorleague player and a major leaguer. Since then, Worrell has helped
members of the UC Berkeley ski team—plus a number of Santa Cruz–
based surfers—sharpen their focus, and he's now working with bigleague umpires to help them call balls and strikes more accurately. His
system, which involves creating optical tests that challenge eye speed
and visual acuity, can work for anyone who needs to keep an eye on
the prize.
Rapid Eye Movement
Ocular Drills: Improving Balance & Staying Focused
Burton Worrell's ocular drills are designed
to improve your visual recognition, focus,
and reaction skills. Spend three minutes
on each of the four exercises shown here.
If you feel like you want to quit before
that, don't. You're building visual stamina,
a critical but overlooked skill for optically
intense endeavors like downhill mountain
biking or searching for handholds on a
granite face.
Walk the Plank
The Challenge: When you're
multitasking at full tilt, balance is one of
the first things to suffer. Forcing yourself
Illustration by Gregory
to focus on a moving object throughout
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your line of sight—while you're moving
and keeping your balance—trains you to
maintain your inner equilibrium.
The Drill: Lay a two-by-four flat on the floor and stand on it with one
foot in front of the other. Pick up a pen that has text printed on the
side and, with your arm fully extended, lift it to eye level. Make wide,
sweeping figure eights with your arm and, moving only your eyes, stay
focused on the letters on the pen. Finally, walk forward and backwards
on the beam while continuing the figure eights.
Connect the Cards
The Challenge: One of the trickiest
aspects of most sports is staying focused
when everything is moving around you.
Think of a wide receiver in football: He
has to concentrate on the ball while he
and the other players around him are in
motion—a situation that easily overtaxes
the brain. Skiers face the same task when
speeding down a line on a crowded slope.
The Drill: Tape ten playing cards around
Illustration by Gregory
the border of a four-by-six-foot
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chalkboard. Draw a complex, twisting
path between two of the cards. In a corner of the board, write down
which two are connected by the line you just drew. Repeat with the
remaining cards so that the board is a jumble of chalk lines that
connect the cards in pairs. Standing seven feet from the board, start
at one of the cards and follow the route as quickly as possible, moving
only your eyes. Check your answer key to ensure you picked the right
path.
Ocular Acrobatics
The Challenge: "You want your eyes to
be able to identify objects instantly," says
Worrell. If you're kayaking and you can't
ID that gnarly rock on your right and then
quickly shift to the waterfall straight
ahead, your system becomes disoriented
and you might miss the safest line
through Class V rapids.
The Drill: From a deck of cards, pick out
the ace through six of one suit. Tape the
cards randomly on a wall close to eye
level, spacing them about one foot apart,
Illustration by Gregory
with the ace in the center. Memorize
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where each card is located. Standing
seven feet from the wall, jump your eyes from card to card in
sequential order as quickly as possible, starting with the ace. You want
your eyes to land on the card without having to refocus, but you don't
want to move to the next card until you can clearly see the current
card. If you lose focus, return to the ace and start over.
Focal-Point Ping-Pong
The Challenge: Skiing, kayaking,
surfing, biking—they all require you to
very quickly switch focus from an up-close
point to one much farther away. If you
can't do the job efficiently, it takes longer
to achieve clear focus, and that's when
crashes happen.
The Drill: Print out a piece of paper
covered with a random mix of all the
letters in the alphabet, with each letter
half an inch tall. Tape up the piece of
paper ten feet away, at eye level. Turn to
a page of small text from this magazine
Illustration by Gregory
and hold it at eye level ten inches from
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your face. Think of a word—like
"outside"—and search the sheet of paper
on the wall for an o. Once you find it, switch to the magazine page to
find a u, then switch back to the wall to find a t, and so on. Keep
spelling different words as quickly as possible.