Today we’re going to be talking about vision training, concussions, and athletic performance.
If you haven’t seen it, there’s a new movie out by Will Smith called Concussion, and it is the story about the doctor who really brought to light what happens in the NFL, or to athletes of all sports who endure repeated head trauma. It’s gathered a lot of popularity right now, so a lot of people are talking to us about concussions, and to be honest, it’s rare for me in my work to go more than maybe a week that I don’t deal with an athlete who has had some kind of traumatic brain injury.
Now, it could be an athlete, a soldier, or someone who was just involved in a car accident. In fact, a few weeks ago I was at a soccer game, and it was a crazy soccer game. I saw two significant knee injuries, and a significant head injury and traumatic brain injuries have gotten a lot more press over the last several years because we’re learning that it doesn’t take a lot to jar the brain around, number one. Number two, the results of that can be long-lasting, so in my work, I am very very big on identifying head injuries, and preventing them whenever necessary.
Now, why that’s so important to me is last year there was a great study that came out, and it looked at the use of vision training in division one college football players to see what kind of impact having better visual skills would have on the number of concussions that were experienced, and it was amazingly dramatic.
So, the basics of the study worked like this. They looked at a division one football team for four years, previous to the vision training, and then they did vision training for another four years, and they compared the number of concussions that were experienced. They went from nine point four to one point four with the addition of vision training.
Reference article – Vision Training & Concussion: http://www.ovpjournal.org/
This is some we’ve been talking about for years, and the speculation right now is we don’t know exactly why it works, but it seems that better vision allows for better field awareness, which allows you to prepare a little bit more quickly for things that are coming at you so that you don’t wind up slamming your head into somebody. Why is this important from a Z-Health perspective?
It’s very simple.
We have been emphasizing vision training for our clients for over a decade, and vision training you can get really complex with it, but it really comes down to four basic skills.
Number one is visual resolution. That basically means how well can you see what you’re looking at? Can you see things up close? Can you see things far away? Can you see things when they’re moving?
That relates very directly to item number two which is eye movements. Can you move your eyes up, and to the right, and down, and left? Do you have good ranges of motion with your eyes? Good eye muscle strength?
Number three is depth perception or depth judgment, meaning can I tell very precisely how close that player is to me compared to that player, or how close that car is to me compared to that car?
Finally is what’s called peripheral awareness, or peripheral vision for some people. Basically, that means how well can you see everything that you’re not staring at.
Now, all of these things live, not just in the eyes, but also in the brain, and that is fantastic news because whatever your vision skills are right now, we believe and believe that science shows this clearly. They can be improved with training, so why am I saying this?
Well, it’s January of 2016, and we have a product called Vision Gym. If you have not seen it, this is your opportunity to pick it up. Again, this has been on my mind just since I went to this soccer game, the movie has come out. I really want people to take time in 2016 to fix their eyes. To work on their vision because I believe that improving your vision has dramatic implications throughout sport, and throughout life.
If you haven’t looked at our Vision Gym, we’re going to put a link below to give you a discount on it, and please check it out.
We have lots of information on vision training in the blogs already, but that program gives you a very direct route to testing your own vision and learning how to improve it, and again, the implications are huge, and the potential benefits are enormous.
If you have any questions about this, please let us know. Otherwise, good luck. Have a great new year.
