Adam Gilchrist vs Shaun Tait | Access All Areas

This is great footage of Adam Gilchrist facing Shaun Tait at Lords last Saturday. Wearing a GoPro camera on his helmet shows great insight to his vision and movement to enable him to hit 2 boundaries!

World Cup 2014

One good thing about England’s early exit from the World Cup is that we won’t have to endure seeing them lose on penalties. It’s typical that the one time we employ a psychiatrist to help with this, the team gets knocked out in the group stage before a penalty shoot-out becomes possible. It’s probably just as well as the players’ negative attitude to the penalty shoot-out seems to run pretty deep. I was listening to Rio Ferdinand the other day saying that he didn’t think that Dr Peters’ success in sports such as cycling was particularly relevant to taking a penalty in a major tournament. Leaving aside Dr Peters’ successful work with Liverpool FC this season, Ferdinand said “I don’t think one person can have that much of an effect on people; he can ease people’s nerves maybe a little bit and make them feel more confident. But when it comes down to that moment of going up there and taking a penalty, things change”. He went on to say: “It’s one, single split second….you’re in the middle of that pitch, all alone in a massive goldfish bowl, being watched by millions; and that pressure is all steeped on your shoulders in that one moment…it’s difficult…when you walk out there and you’ve got those fans there, it’s different (from practice)." Ferdinand described his own experience of preparing to take a penalty in the Champions’ League Final in 2008: “I was next in line after Gigsy. I couldn’t even concentrate on Gigsy taking it: my legs had gone”. Fortunately for Manchester United, Ferdinand didn’t actually have to take the penalty. I can’t think of a better description of why you should have a psychiatrist or psychologist working with the players to prepare them for the moment when they are likely to be under the most pressure of their lives. One person who did take a penalty for Manchester United that day was Owen Hargreaves, who went after Christiano Ronaldo, who had just missed with his attempt. Hargreaves had practised penalties with a lot of the Chelsea players, such as John Terry, when playing in the World Cup with England. They had seen him go the same way, every day: top left. Michael Ballack had also seen Hargreaves practise penalties with Bayern Munich. “I practised every day; I hadn’t missed for a month; top left. As I went up to the penalty spot, I guessed the Chelsea players were pointing where I was going to go. I thought that might happen. So when I went up there I thought “Why not just put it in the other corner on the bottom”. And as I went up I thought “Christ, that goal looks really small”. I’m going to do what I know best, and see if he can save…if my best is better than your best. And I smashed it top corner and it went in”. It seems you have to have been brought up in Germany to be able to clear your head and concentrate on the task in hand: decide where you are going to aim for; focus on that point in the goal; focus on the ball; shoot. The psychological problems of playing for England seem to run pretty deep. This is Steven Gerrard talking before the Uruguay game: “Basically, to realise it could be a terrible, long, frustrating summer if we don’t get it right on Thursday,” Gerrard recalled. “There is no hiding place for a player when you go out of a tournament earlier than you expect. It can be tough and it can take an awful long time to get over it. A lot of people know that in the dressing room but there are a few young lads in there too, so it was important for them to realise what is at stake and how important this game is. “I have been there. I have had that feeling. So I know what that feeling is about and that is the feeling I don’t want on Friday morning. It wasn’t a message to scare any of the lads but it was a wake-up call to everyone in the room. It wasn’t to scare anyone, or intimidate anyone, but this is the reality of where we are and we need everyone focused and right on it, individually and collectively, on Thursday, otherwise it is going to be a terrible, long summer.” I somehow doubt that Dr Peters (about whom more in due course) advised the England captain to dwell on the consequences of losing a match on the eve of playing it. That might, however, be at least a partial explanation for how Gerrard and the team played. David Donner

The A - Z of Sports Vision - The Zone

Some athletes, when they are performing at their peak, appear to be in a world of their own. Nick Faldo, talking about his Open win at Muirfield in 1987 said “Two steps in front of me was my only focal point. The rest was a blur, partly due to the weather and partly because I was completely engrossed”. Tony Jacklin refers to it as being in a cocoon of concentration: “I’m absolutely engaged, involved in what I’m doing at that particular moment”. We now refer to this state as “The Zone”, or “flow”. When a state of flow is reached, a number of chemicals are released in the brain. One of them is a pain-suppressor, Anandamide, which shares similar properties to THC, the active ingredient of Marijuana. Other drugs that are released include amphetamines such as dopamine, endorphins (the name is derived from endogenous morphine), and serotonin, the mood-changing drug that’s released when people take Ecstasy. No wonder athletes talk of “runners’ high”. Getting into the zone requires your subconscious brain to take over control from your conscious brain. This rules out most beginners, as when you are learning a new activity, it’s likely that you are consciously thinking about what you are trying to do. But once you’ve reached the standard of an expert, the main task is to keep conscious thoughts out of it. So if you really try and get in the zone, the chances are you won’t achieve it. The very nature of it requires you not to be trying, not thinking consciously about what you’re doing. Music can help to achieve this state as can visualisation. But another way is to concentrate on your vision – supplying your subconscious brain with the visual information it requires to make the best decisions. Billy Jean King described her experience of the zone as follows: “I concentrate only on the ball in relation to the face of my racket, which is a full time job anyway, since no two balls ever come over the net the same way”. And that seems as good a way as any to end this A to Z of sports vision: I hope you’ve found them of some use or at least interest. I intend to keep blogging. My next one will be a review of a book that could change your life…… David Donner

The A - Z of Sports Vision - Yips

Most people associate the yips with golf. Typically, a player lines up a short putt but, instead of an easy tap in, the player seems to jab at the ball, sending it wide of the hole. In other sports, the condition can become so extreme that the movement becomes completely impossible, such as a darts player who can’t release the dart, or a spin bowler who can’t release the ball. http://puttlab.de/minicms/publications/ARGC_2009_Yips.pdf The cause is not fully understood. One theory is that is caused by an excess of fine muscle activity (focal dystonia), but there seems to be a lot more to it than that. For a start, the prevalence of focal dystonia in the general population is about 3% (Nutt et al 1988), whereas nearly 50% of golfers are said to suffer from the yips to some extent (Smith, Malo et al, 2000).

So there would appear to be a significant psychological element to the yips. In golf, for instance, the yips often disappears if the ball is hidden under a cover and the golfer doesn’t know if there is always a ball to be hit or not. It can also disappear if the ball is fixed to the ground, the hole is removed, or is replaced by a symbolic target like a tee (Marquardt 2009). Often the yips are only apparent for putts of a particular length, and if the putt is longer or shorter than this there is no problem. All this suggests that the problem is not essentially a physical one; otherwise it would still be present in all these other situations, not just in certain situations. Anxiety about the result may well be at the core of the yips, which explains why they are more likely to occur over a short putt, when missing it would be interpreted as a failure, and not for longer putts which have lower expectations of success. As the golfer becomes aware of the problem, the conscious brain starts to interfere with process. This makes the action jerkier and less likely to be successful, so a viscous circle develops as the stress levels rise with each unsuccessful action. There are various psychological methods of dealing with the stress element of the yips; visualisation and self-talk are often useful. One golfer had problems initiating his down-swing. The cure was to get him to say a three-syllable word (“Edelweiss”) to match the timing or rhythm of his swing. So he said Ed-el-weiss to correspond to the initiation of his backswing, the top of his back-swing and the point of contact with the ball (Beilock 2010). But for many a simple treatment is to take them back to when they can swing the club smoothly. This may be achieved by getting them to close their eyes when they strike the ball, or swinging the club without a ball. You then gradually reintroduce the difficulty whilst maintaining the essential visual elements, such the Quiet Eye focus on the ball. This should help keep the conscious brain from interfering. And if things break down again, you retrace the steps (hopefully not right back to the start) and build up again. David Donner

The A - Z of Sports Vision - X-Axis

I read quite a few scientific papers (so you don’t have to), but I despaired of finding anything X-related until I came across a paper by Rienhof et al published in “Frontiers in Psychology” last year.

The authors wanted to see if the perceptual skills required for expertise in one sport could be transferred to another sport. I’ve talked about the “Quiet Eye” a few times. In basketball, for instance, experts have a longer Quiet Eye period, where they fixate a precise target such as a particular part of the rim, than lesser players. The authors of this paper wanted to see if that advantage would be transferred if elite basketball players took up a new sport that also involved throwing, such as darts. They suggest that free throw misses may be more likely to be due to horizontal errors than vertical ones (I actually don’t see why that should be true, but never mind for now). Given that in both darts and basketball you’re throwing towards a target that’s straight in front of you, but at different heights, they said that differences between the free throw task and the darts task might be greater in the y-axis (vertical) than in the x-axis (horizontal). They therefore speculated that expert basketball players would be more accurate in the horizontal plane when throwing darts, but no more accurate in the vertically. They found that skilled basketball players were more accurate at throwing darts (none of them had thrown darts before). Furthermore, they found that the skilled players did indeed show significantly smaller deviations on the x-axis, but the y-axis deviation was similar for both groups. They didn’t find, however, any differences in the Quiet Eye period between the two groups when playing darts. This suggests that either the Quiet Eye is specific to a particular task, or that it is only displayed once the skill has to some degree been learnt. It seems logical to me that if you’ve achieved a high level of expertise at one throwing task, you will to some extent be able to transfer that to another throwing task. It could take a while however to work out the precise visual cues required to become an expert at the new sport. Give time, I suspect that the expert basketball players would work it out before the lesser players did. David Donner

The A - Z of Sports Vision - Watch The Ball

In the recent 6 Nations rugby there were some classic examples of players knocking the ball on because they had taken their eyes off the ball, usually because they are distracted by a player about to tackle them. But then in football, players are often accused of “ball watching”, when they are so concentrated on the ball that they don’t notice that a player has been left unmarked.

But if that’s confusing, you would think that the requirement to watch the ball in sports such as tennis or cricket would be sacrosanct. However, numerous studies have shown that this isn’t exactly the case: the ball is actually travelling too fast to do this. One of the first was Land & Mcleod (2000) who found that elite batsmen followed the ball for a while before switching their vision to where they predicted the ball would bounce, and then tracking the ball from there until they hit the ball with their bat. Some batsmen, however, are more elite than others. A recent study (Mann, Spratford & Abernethy, 2013) studied two batsmen who had played more than 70 Tests matches, averaging over 45 (I suspect one of them might have been Matthew Hayden), as well as two club-level cricketers. They batted against a ball-projection machine that displayed a life-sized video projection of a bowler in his run up. At the moment of ball release a ball was actually released through a hole in the screen. The participants wore an eye-tracking device that the direction of the head and gaze when batting. They found that the elite batsmen tended to keep their gaze either in alignment with, or ahead of the ball. In contrast, the club batsmen were more likely to have their gaze either in alignment with or behind the ball. The latter only had their gaze ahead of the ball for short-pitched deliveries, and only then for a short period of time after the ball had bounced and before they made contact with the bat. On average the elite batsmen directed their gaze further ahead of the ball, and for a longer time, than the club players. In particular, elite players directed their gaze ahead of the ball immediately prior to hitting it with their bat, whereas club players tended to be behind the ball at this crucial time. Elite batsmen were found to couple their head movement more closely to the movement of the ball, especially as it got nearer to them. They also moved their gaze further in advance of their head direction. In other words, the elite batsmen closely aligned their head with the direction of the ball, whereas club-level batsmen more closely aligned their eyes with the ball. Sometimes the elite batsmen would have their gaze so far in advance of the ball that the image of the ball would be in their peripheral vision; but they still managed to keep their head aligned with the ball. The authors liken this to using a miner’s torch on your head to keep a spotlight on a moving object. Whereas Land & McLeod had found that better players made one saccade (where the eyes jump to a new location) to where they expected the ball to bounce, and then tracked the ball to contact, these elite players made a second saccade after the bounce of the ball to where they anticipated the contact would be. This second saccade was made for balls that were either short of a length or on a good length. Club players were much less likely to make a second saccade. All players made just one saccade when the ball was of a full length, but the elite players’ saccade took them past the bounce point to the predicted contact point, whereas that of the club players tended to lag behind the contact point. The coupling of the head to the movement of the ball seems to help the elite batsmen predict where the contact point will be. Crucially, this meant that the elite players were more likely to have a sharp focus on the contact between bat and ball compared with the club players. “Keep your head aligned with the ball” would not be a particularly helpful instruction to aspiring young batsmen, even though it seems to be what’s required at an elite level. I think the best coaches could advise would be to watch the bowler’s action carefully (so you can predict where the ball will bounce and what type of delivery it will be), carefully note where the ball pitches, and try and watch the contact point between bat and ball. David Donner

The A - Z of Sports Vision - Visualisation (and video)

Visualisation should be an essential part of any athlete’s training because it can have a profound effect on performance. In fact, most athletes probably do use visualisation, but they don’t necessarily use it very effectively, and may even be using it in a way that negatively affects their performance. For instance, if you replay a mistake you’ve made over and over in your head, it’s like practicing making errors so makes it more likely that you’ll make the same mistake again. The first mistake people make is to think that visualisation is just about vision – what you’ve seen. That’s partly because visualisation is something of a misnomer: “mental rehearsal” would be a better term (except I’d have to come up with another “V”) because it allows you to use all your senses to recreate the activity, and that’s when it becomes really powerful. To give you an idea just how powerful it can be, 10 volunteers took part in mental workouts 5 times a week for 12 weeks in which they had to imagine pushing against a heavy object (Ranganathan et al, 2003). They actually increased their bicep muscle strength by 13.5%, and maintained this increase for three months after the training stopped. A famous imagery experiment involved wiring electrodes to the legs of an Alpine skier to test out the notion that vivid imagery produces electrical activity within the muscles similar to the electrical impulses produced during actual movement (Suinn 1980). The experiment showed that when the skier was sitting down, simply thinking of skiing downhill, similar electrical patterns were found in the muscles as if he had actually been skiing. By imaging or visualising yourself playing sport, the muscles you would use to physically perform the task are stimulated at a very low level. This gentle muscle activation is not strong enough to produce actual movements, but it establishes a blueprint for that particular movement or situation. By visualising a successful performance, it makes it more likely that you will produce the correct response while under pressure. The subconscious brain can’t easily distinguish the difference between imagination and reality the way your conscious brain does. This is why dreams can sometimes feel really lifelike. So visualisation is just another form of practice, and it’s much better to practise doing things well than doing them badly. Visualisation can be used for learning new skills, strategies and routines, but it can also be used to motivate, control stress and boost confidence. It can be used to improve concentration and to recover from injury, as well as dealing with errors and stressful situations. It’s also been found that athletes instructed to imagine successfully performing a task voluntarily practised longer than others. You can visualise your performance as you normally see it, or as it might look on TV. Video can help athletes visualise their performance in real time. I’m currently videoing some rugby players in training. The idea is to pick out some of their best bits, and maybe set them to music, so players can use this as part of their pre-match preparation and general confidence booster. It will be interesting to see how it works. David Donner