scholarly journals Sports Vision. Vision Care for the Enhancement of Sports Performance

2008 ◽  
Vol 91 (4) ◽  
pp. 422-423 ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 35-36
Author(s):  
Graham Erickson

Optometry has a long tradition of providing vision care services to optimize daily function. While this has often focused on academic and occupational performance, sports performance is another important area where vision plays a critical role. Athletes, trainers and coaches have recognized that excellent vision is an important aspect of performance [...]


Author(s):  
Henrique Nascimento ◽  
Cristina Alvarez-Peregrina ◽  
Clara Martinez-Perez ◽  
Miguel Ángel Sánchez-Tena

Background: Sports vision is a specialisation of optometry whose objective is to improve and preserve visual function to increase sports performance. The main objective of the present study was to compare the visual expertise of non-athletes to skeet shooting athletes. Methods: Participants underwent an optometric assessment in which all those with severe deviations from normal vision, after compensating for visual abnormalities, were eliminated. After that, the following six visuospatial components were measured: hand–eye coordination, peripheral awareness, fixation disparity, saccadic eye movements, speed of recognition and visual memory. To measure the aforementioned components, the following tests were used: directional arrows, similar and different characters, the dichromatic disparity test, character marking, a tachistoscopic test and tic-tac-toe using COI-vision software. Results: Skeet shooting athletes performed significatively better (p ≤ 0.05) in two out of the six tests: hand–eye coordination and visual memory. Conclusions: Although this study does not support the theory that athletes—in this case, skeet shooting athletes—perform significantly better in most components of the visuospatial tests, visual memory and hand–eye coordination are exceptions. To be more accurate in distinguishing between athletes and non-athletes, specific testing methods that can be used by a wide variety of disciplines should be developed. Training the weakest aspects of athletes can improve their sports performance.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rishabh Gupta

Sport can be defined as a physical activity involving large muscle groups, requiring strategic methods, physical training and mental preparations and whose outcome is determined within in a rule, and by skill, not by chance. Specific sports demand specific visual skills as per its requirements and present new challenges under different conditions. Aiming and Anticipation are the basic vision requirements of every individual sports but these two skills can share different proportion according to different sports. The two factors that plays an important role in improved sports performance are Visual acuity and Contrast sensitivity.


2008 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
J. H. C. Buys ◽  
J. T. Ferreira

The purpose of this study was to find the most appropriate protocol to establish norms for the most important visual skills required by elite athletes in sports performance. One hundred and fifty eight elite athletes were tested and their visual skills categorized as being: superior, above average, average, ineffective or needs immediate attention. Two methods namely, the percentage method and the mean and standard deviation method were employed to find the most applicable way to establish these categories.  The results indicate that elite athletes perform very well for all the visual skills tested and that the norms thus established suggest the importance of these visual skills in sports performance.


2008 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 63-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris E. Cooper

Optimum performance in aerobic sports performance requires an efficient delivery to, and consumption of, oxygen by the exercising muscle. It is probable that maximal oxygen uptake in the athlete is multifactorial, being shared between cardiac output, blood oxygen content, muscle blood flow, oxygen diffusion from the blood to the cell and mitochondrial content. Of these, raising the blood oxygen content by raising the haematocrit is the simplest acute method to increase oxygen delivery and improve sport performance. Legal means of raising haematocrit include altitude training and hypoxic tents. Illegal means include blood doping and the administration of EPO (erythropoietin). The ability to make EPO by genetic means has resulted in an increase in its availability and use, although it is probable that recent testing methods may have had some impact. Less widely used illegal methods include the use of artificial blood oxygen carriers (the so-called ‘blood substitutes’). In principle these molecules could enhance aerobic sports performance; however, they would be readily detectable in urine and blood tests. An alternative to increasing the blood oxygen content is to increase the amount of oxygen that haemoglobin can deliver. It is possible to do this by using compounds that right-shift the haemoglobin dissociation curve (e.g. RSR13). There is a compromise between improving oxygen delivery at the muscle and losing oxygen uptake at the lung and it is unclear whether these reagents would enhance the performance of elite athletes. However, given the proven success of blood doping and EPO, attempts to manipulate these pathways are likely to lead to an ongoing battle between the athlete and the drug testers.


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