Sports Vision Casebook - Rugby Place Kicking

There are two main visual components of place kicking in rugby: alignment and visualisation.

There’s not going to be one correct method for alignment or visualisation for everyone, so there’s likely to be a certain amount of trial and error, for instance in choosing the type of kicking tee that suits you best.

The first part of alignment is to align the tee, and then the ball on the tee. Leigh Halfpenny aligns the tee with the centre of the posts and the seam of the ball with the right hand post, taking into account the natural draw for a right-footed kicker. Similarly, Jonny Wilkinson tilts the ball a little to the left, and Dan Carter at the start of his run up, aims for the left hand post.

As you move forward to kick the ball, the focus should be on the precise point of the ball where you want to make contact .This means picking a spot within the pattern of the ball, as small as a dimple, and keeping a constant fixation on that spot.

Some players have a tendency to lift their head as they kick, to watch the path of the ball. Lifting the head too early will result in a loss of power and control. If this is a persistent problem, you can try keeping a tennis ball under your chin to keep your head down.

When Johnny Wilkinson was taking kicks for England, he’d imagine that there was a lady called Doris whom he could see through the posts sitting in the crowd. I think at one time he imagined she was reading a newspaper. Then he imagined she was holding a drink which he would try and knock out of her hand. He would then have an imaginary line, like an imaginary wire, the ball would follow on its way through the posts to Doris.

Leigh Halfpenny visualises a third post in the middle of the other two. He aims to hit that middle post. If it’s a windy day, he moves that imaginary post slightly to compensate. He imagines that the sweet spot of the ball is attached by a piece of string to that third post. He looks back from the post down the piece of string.

A combination of these ideas might be very effective: for instance, you might imagine a real or fictional character sitting on top of the imaginary third post and pulling the string. Your aim would be to knock that character off their perch.

Visualisation can also be effective in dealing with the pressure of taking the kick. Halfpenny, for instance, always imagines his old training ground of Gorseinon, even when he’s in the Millennium Stadium.

Then it’s just a question of practice, and more practice. If you practice the more difficult kicks, it will make most of the match day kicks seem easier. Halfpenny even takes kicks form the try line to hit the post as a test of his accuracy.

David Donner

Sports Vision Casebook - Scrum Halves

The rugby players I’ve worked with most have been scrum halves, but I think I’d use a similar process for a player in any position.

We began by doing some profiling, which was something some of the players had done and some hadn’t. We looked at the skills required to be a great scrum half, dividing them up into technical, tactical, physical and psychological categories. We used this to work out which areas would be most useful for the players to work on so they could progress to the next level of the game.

I also tried to work out some of the visual requirements for being a scrum half. Whereas most people in this field would think of things like peripheral vision and visual acuity (seeing clearly), I wanted to concentrate more on how these players should use their vision in game situations. So I came up with a list that included things like identifying and focusing on targets when passing and kicking; scanning both sides of the field for overlaps and mis-matches; searching for areas of space behind the defence to attack; and analysing defenders at the ruck to aid decision making.

The players wanted most to work on their passing skills, which we narrowed down to speed and especially accuracy. I started off by getting them to pass a series of balls against a marker on a goal post. This was done from both sides, initially with balls on the ground. Some competition was introduced by timing them against each other. We then set up simulations of passing from a ruck (they had to dig out the ball from under my foot), and from a line out (I would toss the ball over my head for them to catch before passing).

This was all fine, but you’re not passing against a post in a match. In order to do this I needed a receiver, but I wanted to keep to the same levels of accuracy. So I’ve introduced a rule which begins by saying that the receiver must maintain the same body position as he moves forward to catch the ball: no stooping or jumping up allowed. Next, the receiver is also only allowed to move their arms below their elbow. And finally, they can only move their hands to catch the ball – no other arm movement is allowed. The scrum halves score a point for each pass that is successfully caught under these conditions.

I also videoed the players’ passing. It was interesting to see that one player kicked out his back leg as he passed the ball. He had clearly fallen into the habit of doing this in order to keep his balance, and was understandably reluctant to change his technique. I did feel, however, that this was a sign that he was inherently unstable when he passed, and this explained why he would sometimes lift his head when he let go of the ball. This also helped to keep his centre of gravity more central, and stopped him from falling over. Unfortunately, it also meant that the ball would fly over the receiver’s head.

David Donner

Sports Vision Casebook - Rugby Centre

A few years ago a rugby coach asked for my advice about a young centre who kept dropping the ball. I was able to give some suggestions, but I didn’t actually see the player, so I wasn’t able to see exactly what the problem was. And since the player moved on shortly afterwards, I couldn’t tell how effective the advice might have been. Now I’m actually working at a rugby club, I’ve thought about what advice I’d give to a coach now in the same situation.

The first piece of advice, of course, would be for the player to have their eyes tested, in case there is a fundamental eyesight problem. Assuming the result is normal, the likely explanation is that the player is either taking their eyes of the ball, in response to movement by the opponents, or that the player hasn’t prepared properly to catch the ball.

Meir (2005) implemented some visual training into the players at Gloucester Rugby Club. The coaching staff had found that problems with passing and catching in drills occurred because players often simply failed to either identify the target when they were passing, or didn’t look at the ball when receiving a pass from a teammate.

To improve concentration on the ball in volleyball, Vickers & Adolphe (1997) marked the ball with numbers. The receiver had to call out the numbers when they could perceive them in flight. This could obviously be adapted to a rugby ball being passed, and this was indeed one of the training methods that Meir used, along with patching one eye. This meant that the player had to turn his head round in order to focus on the ball or the target.  He also got players to train with “agility balls”: these have an uneven shape, so bounce in unpredictable ways.

If your passing practice is carried out unopposed, it’s more likely that players will take their eyes off the ball when faced with opposition in a match. So doing a passing drill in a confined space with opponents trying to win the ball should help with passing under pressure, quick hands, communication and concentration.

More on rugby in due course.

David Donner

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