Sports Vision Casebook - Putting Part 3

The other aspects of putting are reading the greens and visualisation. It’s much easier to judge the distance of a putt accurately from the side rather than from behind, but you can also get a good judgement by walking the distance.

Judging the slope of the greens is also aided by using proprioceptive information from your feet. If you stand with your feet pointing uphill, the further back towards your heels that you can feel the weight, the steeper the putt. If you are standing upright and you feel the weight on your heels, that means a slope of about 4%; if the weight is on your toes, it’s about a 1% slope.

To get the aiming point, I like the method shown here: http://puttingzone.com/MyTips/spider.html
For the strength of the putt, you should aim for a point about 9 inches behind the hole on the path you’ve decided.

Some people use visualisation to judge the line of the putt. One technique is to imagine that the hole of full of water which starts to overflow. You just have to note the path of the water, and this will be the path for your ball in reverse.

When Tiger Woods was a toddler, his father Earl had him put a ball in his right hand and roll it to a hole. Then he had Tiger close his eyes and roll it into the hole again. He asked Tiger what he had “seen” after he had closed his eyes. Tiger replied that he had seen a “picture” of the hole. Earl told him to always “putt to that picture” before he struck the ball, creating a picture in his head of where he wanted the ball to go.  So Tiger’s focus wouldn’t be on the mechanics of the shot, but simply what needed to be done to the best he can visualise. Once he was comfortable with the instant pre-play in his mind’s eye, he’d play the shot.

Jack Nicklaus cited visualisation as the number one secret to his success, and even visualised every shot during practice: “First, I see the ball where I want it to finish, nice and white and sitting up high on the bright green grass. Then the scene quickly changes, and I see the ball going there: its path, trajectory and shape, even its behaviour on landing. Then there is a sort of fade-out, and the next scene shows me making the kind of swing that will turn the previous images into reality”.

Everyone will have their own type of imagery that works best for them, but it all comes down to creating some kind of pathway in your head, and then you just have to try and get the ball to follow that pathway.

Talking to the two pro golfers that I’ve seen recently, I got the impression that visualisation was an area they could improve. With practice, it’s possible to make it almost as realistic as the physical act of putting itself.

David Donner

Sports Vision Casebook - Putting Part 2

I’ve recently seen a couple of professional golfers in my practice. Interestingly, they were both right-handed and left eye dominant. They were consistent in their dominance, so this didn’t explain why one of them was tending to miss his putts to the left.

Ideally, when you are checking the line of the putt, you want your head right over the ball and parallel to the ground, so your eyes can look straight out of your head and onto the ball. If your head is tilted up, you will have to look down your nose a bit if you right over the ball. This is likely to result in you hitting the ball to the inside of the correct line (to the left if you are right-handed). You don’t notice this when you are aligning the putt, because when you look to the hole, your eyes will look up, imperceptibly to you, so you’ll think that you are in perfect alignment.

Conversely, if your head is tipped down, so your forehead is below your chin, your eyes will have to look up towards your eyebrows, and you will tend to hit the putt to the right.

You can have your head tilted up a bit and have your eyes looking straight out of your head, but you eyes would need to be a bit away from the ball: it’s not ideal, but you can still putt straight in that position.

But if your forehead is flat, with your dominant eye looking straight down at the target (usually a dimple on the back of the ball, where a line from the target through the ball would come out), when your head swivels towards the target, your eyes should move in line, as should your hands when you make the putt.

You can check this by creating a hole with your hands as if you were checking eye dominance. Start by looking through the hole to your target point on the ball, close your eyes and then move your head towards the hole (which obviously you can’t actually see)and swing your arms as if making the putt. Open your eyes when you think you’ve reached the point that you can look through the gap in your hands to see the hole. You may have under- or over-shot, but are you still aligned with your putt? It takes a lot of practice to achieve alignment, because it’s very easy for imperfections to occur, such as your chin coming towards your body as you turn. When I tried this on my professional golfer, we found that when he looked through the gap in his hands, he was to the left of the target.

The other aspect of putting is, of course, reading the putt in the first place. More of that in part 3.

David Donner


References:
Geoff Mangum (The Putting Zone)

Sports Vision Casebook - Putting - Part 1

Following on from my previous blog on eye dominance, I want to talk about vision and putting, starting with more on eye dominance. One of the first sports vision assessments I did within my practice was a young golfer brought in by his father because he was missing a lot of putts.

Having established that there was nothing wrong with his eyesight, I decided to have a look at his eye dominance. I had two golf balls, so I placed one on the floor and got him to stand by it as if he were taking a putt. The other ball I placed on the floor at the end of the room to simulate the hole.

I asked the young man to put one hand over the other to form a small hole between them. I told him to hold his arms out straight and to look through that hole to the ball next to him and to close each eye in turn to see which one stayed in alignment. I then asked him to do the same for the ball at the end of the room. 

It turned out that when he fixated the ball, he used his right eye for alignment, but when he fixated the hole he used his left eye. It’s not surprising that is you’re aligning one task with different eyes that you won’t be very accurate.

These were early days in my sports vision career, so I wasn’t entirely sure how to advise him to correct this problem, but I think just explaining the problem was helpful. I told him that he needed to make some kind of adjustment, either in the position of the ball or in the angle of his head when he looked at the ball or hole, to ensure that he was consistent with his aiming eye. 

I would also have checked his dominant eye in the more conventional fashion of making a hole with his hands and looking through it to my nose. I can’t remember now which his dominant eye was, and whether the non-dominant eye took over when he was looking at the ball or hole. But I also suggested that he might find it helpful to begin with by closing the non-dominant eye so he could get in a position where he could be sure of aligning with the dominant eye.

Since then, I have learned rather more about aiming when putting as I’ve started to see some professional golfers...more of that in Part 2. 

David Donner

Eye Dominance and Clay Pigeon Shooting

A friend of mine recently told me that he’d been invited to do some clay pigeon shooting. He was concerned that he wasn’t sure which eye he should be using when aiming.

This brings us back to our old friend, eye dominance. If you are aligning one object, such as the end of a gun, with another object, such as a clay pigeon, you can only do this accurately with one eye – the “dominant” or sighting eye – as the other eye will be slightly out of line.

If you are right-handed and right eye dominant, there’s no problem. But if your gun is in front of your right eye, and you are aligning with your left eye, your shot will slightly off target. So my first piece of advice was to check his eye dominance in something that approximated a shooting condition (some people, including myself, use different eyes to align depending on which arm is pointing). He could do this with a simple stick, held as if it were a gun, and pointed towards a distant object such as an aerial on a roof. He simply closes each eye in turn to see which is in alignment.

He discovered that when he closed his right eye he was aligned, but not when he closed his left. As he is right-handed, this would mean that his shots would be a bit to the left of the target. He could counter this by aiming slightly right of the target if it’s coming overhead. You normally need to aim in front of the clay to take into account its movement after the shot. But if the target is coming from his right he should aim straight at it; and if it is coming from his left he’d need to aim even a bit further ahead of the clay than usual.

If all that seems too complicated, a simple answer would be to close his left eye, although that’s not ideal as you do lose some perceptual information. It can, however work as a quick fix. In the event, my friend used a combination of these strategies, and he seemed to feel he got on pretty well for a beginner.

Somebody who is shooting regularly and has this “cross-dominance” problem may be able to learn to shoot left-handed. Otherwise, there are some products available. “Shotspot” is an opaque circle that you put on the centre of the lens of the dominant eye. This distorts the central image enough to make you use the non-dominant eye. Some wrap-around sunglass suppliers offer a choice of interchangeable lenses, so you can have a yellow or clear lens in front of you non-dominant eye, and a dark lens in front of your dominant one. The yellow lens might be more effective than the clear one because it will enhance the contrast, especially in poor light conditions.

For more advanced levels, there is a product called “Easy Hit!!” This is a fibre optic bead that is attached to the gun barrel. The idea of this product is to encourage the non-dominant eye to align, without disturbing the vision of the dominant eye as the shooter naturally aligns their non-dominant eye with this fluorescent bead. This therefore seems to give a more natural vision, and for £30 seems good value.

David Donner

Watch The Ball

I was recently alerted to an article by former England batsman Ed Smith. He described an occasion when he was chopping some wood with an axe. He found that when he concentrated intensely on the intended point of contact, he became clumsy. But when he relaxed and let the axe swing, whilst only casually noting the target, he landed the axe on exactly the right spot. This led him to the belief that in cricket, we talk too much about watching the ball.

My first reaction was that chopping wood is rather a different task to batting. Although when chopping you need to fixate the target to begin with, once you’ve made some incision into the wood you need to repeat the same action using muscle memory. When batting, however, you are not simply looking to repeat the previous action, as each delivery from the bowler is likely to be slightly different. Each shot must be tightly related to the path of the ball, although it’s not uncommon to see a beautiful looking drive that misses the ball by a considerable margin.

And then I recalled a match involving Old Tonbridgians that I umpired several years ago. Tonbridge were chasing a fairly modest total and, having lost an early wicket had a fruitful second wicket partnership. One player seemed full of confidence and talent, and was soon hitting seemingly decent deliveries all around the ground. By the time he was out, for about 40, the game was more than half won. The other player I recall as being older and taller and extremely courteous and polite. I thought he was a rather nervous player, as he was constantly asking for his guard to be checked (I know a few umpires who would have been very fed up with that). He really struggled at the start of his innings, being dropped off a sitter early on, and making numerous streaky shots. Once he got past about 40, he started making some nice drives, and took his side to victory with a score of about 60.

After the match, I was told that Tonbridge had an ex-England player, and I assumed it was the batsmen who had smashed the ball everywhere, but it turned out to be the other one. It certainly didn’t look the innings of a professional cricketer, let alone an international one. But maybe he hadn’t been playing very much and was quite rusty, so took a while to find his rhythm. And that’s really Ed’s point, that rhythm, both when batting or bowling, can be at least as important as watching the ball.
There are some good reasons why players are told to concentrate on watching the ball, apart from the obvious one that you need to know where the ball is in order to hit it. One is that players can pre-meditate a shot. A slow bowler floats the ball in the air and the batsman is looking towards the pavilion, where he expects the ball to go, head up as he players his shot. Soon he finds himself back in that pavilion.

The other reason is that players can easily be full of distracting thoughts and nerves, and that telling them to watch the ball gives them something to concentrate on that’s both essential and can block out the other distractions.

At the start of the innings, or when facing a new bowler, there are a lot of variables for the batsman to deal with. Batting is all about anticipation, so it’s essential to watch the bowler’s action and the release of the ball. Focus then jumps to where the ball pitches, and the speed and bounce off the pitch need to be noted as each cricket pitches are quite variable.  It’s usually only once batsmen have been in for a while that they can accurately anticipate what the ball is going to do, and then get into a rhythm. At that point, they may say that they are “seeing it like a football”, which suggests that they are still concentrating on the ball. They are anticipating so effectively that the ball is exactly where they expect it to be at contact, and may even say they can see the maker’s name on the ball.

To bat effectively, you need both concentration and being relaxed in your movements. Some batsmen, and our “streaky” international may well be one of them, have great difficulty in getting relaxed  and may actually find that the instruction to concentrate on the ball keeps them tense. And you can’t make smooth movements when you’re tense. So for those players, whilst they still need to watch the ball, it may be better to give them a word or phrase that stops their body from freezing up, and allows their subconscious brain to carry out the well-practised task of playing shots without the conscious brain trying to take over.

So whilst I would maintain that watching the ball is still essential to batting, there is never going to be one coaching instruction that will be the best for everyone. And, in case you’re wondering who that former England player was, it was indeed Ed Smith.

David Donner

Sports Vision Casebook - Catching

I recently received a call from a lady whose 14-year old son plays in the school cricket team. She told me that his coach had noticed that he had difficulty with balls above eye level and thought he might have an eye problem.

I assumed from this that the problem was when he was batting, dealing with short-pitched deliveries. So when he came in for his appointment, and after establishing that he had no significant prescription, I asked him if he had problems dealing with bouncers. He replied that he had no problem, as he always ducked out of the way. He did, however, have some difficulty with balls that were angled into him. It turned out that the coach’s remark referred to trying to catch a ball that had been skied in the air.

I wasn’t sure whether this was a problem of technique or of being afraid of a hard ball, so I tried to come up with a strategy to cover both. I explained that it’s easy to lose confidence once you’ve dropped one or two catches, and you can start hoping the ball doesn’t come to you. This means that when another does come your way you are slow to get into position, and you are nervous, which makes your body stiff and the ball more likely to bounce out.

The important thing, therefore, is to build up confidence by starting with easy catches using a tennis ball, but with prefect technique. There are two ways of catching a high ball, and I think that optically the better of the two is the “reverse cup”, also known as the Australian method, in which the hands are reversed with the thumbs are interlinked. The advantage of this method is that you can watch the ball right into your hands, whereas that’s almost impossible with the “Orthodox” or English method (little fingers interlinked) when the ball is dropping past your face. Another advantage of the Australian method is that if the ball does bounce out, it’s easier to grab it again before it hits the ground. Some people actually manage to watch the path of the ball through the gap between their thumbs, which can give this method a third advantage.

People often talk about “soft hands”, but you don’t want them to be too soft and floppy. It’s more important that your shoulders aren’t tense, and shoulder tension is a major reason for the hands not “giving” when taking the catch.

The idea is to gradually increase the height of the ball which can be achieved by getting someone to hit it up with a tennis racket. Then you can move on to catching a cricket ball, again starting with lower heights.

When confident with catches that are straight to you, you can move on to catches for which you have to run. It’s essential that you look carefully at the point when the ball is at its maximum height, so your brain can tell (instinctively) when gravity will bring it down to a catching height. As you run to take the catch, the aim is to get in such a position that the ball looks as if it’s going in a straight line towards you, and not off to the side. It should also appear to be going at a steady speed: if it looks to be accelerating upwards, you need to move back; if it’s accelerating downwards, you need to me forwards.

When you do take a good catch, you need to take time to recall it in as much detail as possible, and to use this as part of your visualisation practice and match preparation. If he takes all this on board, our young cricketer should soon be hoping the batsman will sky a shot in his direction, anticipating and relishing the chance to impress the coach.

David Donner

(images:cricketweb.net)

Sport Vision Casebook: Eye dominance in golf

Much of my early work in sports vision was in golf. I was once part of a team that did some vision screening at a golf academy in Sussex. At that time I was still thinking like an optometrist, looking for eye problems that could be solved in a conventional way, for instance with contact lenses.

We found no problems with the eyes of nearly all the students. There was just one young man who’d always had a weak eye (if I remember rightly he had a small squint). His problem was reading the greens. Apparently, when he had another player read the greens for him, he’d won a tournament. It was only some time afterwards that I thought that if I had an expert telling where to aim, I still wouldn’t win any tournaments, but I’d play an awful lot better golf than normal. 

There’s no doubt that being monocular would be a disadvantage for professional golf. But at the risk of seeming harsh, I did wonder if this chap was starting to see lack of binocular vision as a reason for failure, rather than being determined not to let it hold him back.

Since then, my focus has shifted more to the “software” side of vision: in particular, how experts use their vision in sport. One “hardware” issue that often crops up in golf, however, is eye dominance. Over the years I’ve seen many golfers, from the very young to quite elderly, who feel their eyesight is letting them down when they’re putting. 

putt

It’s always necessary to do a full eye examination to rule out problems with their prescription or eye health, but the next thing I do is to check their eye dominance. I get them to place their right hand over their left, leaving a little gap between their thumbs and forefingers. Standing a few feet away, I get them to raise their arms and to look at my nose through the hole they’ve made. It’s easy to see which eye they are using for alignment. I then get them to repeat the test, but with their left hand over their right. If there’s any hesitation or inconsistency, I get them to do this a few times. 

I then put a golf ball in front of them and get them to set up in their normal putting stance. I put another ball on the floor about twenty feet away. I ask them to put their hands together, roughly as if they were holding a club, but in such as way as again to leave a small gap they can look through. I ask them to line up with the contact point on the ball. If they close each eye in turn they can tell which the aligning eye is. I then ask them to play an imaginary shot to the other ball, and again see which eye is aligning. 

I’ve found on a number of occasions that they are aligning with different eyes for different parts of the stroke, and I believe that this can cause their shot to stray slightly off target. If they’ve shown consistent eye dominance in the first assessment, I try and get them to use that eye all the way through their putting. It usually just requires a small change in head position to achieve this, and people report greater putting consistency as a result.

If you have a sporting problem you think might be vision-related, you can email me at donneroptometrists@gmail.com