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

Culture of Success

I recently came across an interesting quote: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. The quote has been attributed to Peter Drucker, a management consultant, but I am far from the first to see its relevance to sport.

The idea is that if you want to build lasting success, just changing a part of the set-up is unlikely to bring that about: you have to establish the right culture that permeates through to every part of the organisation.

There are two parts to bringing this about. Firstly, there’s a dream (a sports vision, if you like); then there’s getting everyone else to buy into that dream. It’s the second part that’s usually the most difficult. So the club owner should have a vision of where they want the club to be, and get the coaches to work towards that end.

A major part of creating a culture of success is to establish some core values, which will be the basis of that success. The US secret service, for instance, has 5 core values: justice, courage, duty, honesty and loyalty. Rugby coach Eddie Jones has three core values: respect (for team mates, fans, game and referee), discipline (doing things in the right way at all times) and courage (both physical and mental).

Coaches need to exemplify these values themselves, as well as reinforcing them to their players by rewarding good behaviour and punishing bad behaviour, mostly by making them factors in selection.

                  
Of course these values need to be realistic, which depends on the level and personal circumstances of your players. Successful teams also usually have a range of personalities: especially useful are those who may not appear to be the most talented, but seem to bring out the best in others. A prime example of this is the “Butler Way” – the philosophy of the Butler University “Bulldog” teams (especially basketball) that was established nearly 100 years ago. Their key is to find players who not only fit into the culture of the organisation, but are driven to achieve success through inspiring their team mates. As they take to the court, they see the word “catalyst” to remind themselves of the chain reaction that will lead to victory. In the past decade alone, Butler teams have captured 26 conference championships in four different leagues. That’s a culture of success. 

David Donner

Patching

I was recently listening to a cricket podcast. The expert panel was asked about the benefits of vision training, especially for late developers. The experts agreed that generalised vision training was of little use, except possibly as a psychological boost. Vision training that was done in the context of the sport, however, might be helpful. Needless to say, those views echo my own precisely.

One coach said that it could be useful to patch one eye when practising bowling, batting or fielding. He has got his batsmen on occasion to wear a patch over what he called the “motor eye”, which is the eye that leads when we are tracking a moving object. The idea was that this would “strengthen” the other eye. I think he was on stronger ground when he suggested that because this was putting his batsmen in a challenging position, so it would help them deal with other difficult situations that they might encounter in a match, which is why his players found it both challenging and useful. I’m certainly all for making practice highly demanding, so that you are mentally and physically prepared for the challenged that will come your way on match day.

                  

I was reminded of an experiment on eye dominance and tennis that I’ve discussed before. It was found that blurring the non-dominant eye of elite tennis players had a deleterious effect on performance, whereas fogging the dominant eye did not. This rather paradoxical finding was explained by suggesting that the non-dominant eye was essential for depth perception. Whilst this may well be true, I’m no longer sure that it explains the findings as the dominant eye must also be essential for really accurate depth perception.

                  

I therefore suspect that what happened in these tennis players was the same as happened to the cricketers: when the dominant eye was blurred, it felt really strange, so the players had to concentrate harder on the ball. In doing so, they were able to perceive monocular cues such as image size, which meant that their depth perception wasn’t actually too badly affected. When the non-dominant eye was blurred, however, because the effect on vision was less noticeable, they made little or no adjustment for it.

                  

So, patching the dominant eye can be a useful exercise, but it probably needs to be used sparingly. It’s likely to result in adjustments to the body, such as a head tilt. If a player doesn’t have really strong eye dominance, they could start switching during competition, and if they don’t make the necessary compensatory adjustments their timing and other judgements could be all wrong.

                  

I’m not sure how this relates to late developers, but I suspect it depends on why they are developing late. It could help with getting them to concentrate on the ball as it leaves the bowler’s hand, or help them get into line better. But if they are late developers because they haven’t played much cricket, you would probably be better leaving them to work this out for themselves. If the idea is to make the practice more challenging, there are other ways of doing this, such as using smaller balls and/or bats, or getting them to read markings on the ball as it approaches.

                  

Patching can be useful in a number of sports. In golf, for instance, it could be used to ensure that the player maintains eye dominance when switching from the ball to the target. In rugby, you might notice that some players are not paying enough attention to the passer’s hands as he passes the ball. This means that they are late in reacting to the ball as it appears in front of them and therefore drop it. One solution would be to patch the left eye for passes coming from their left, and the right eye for passes coming from their right. This would then require them to turn their head towards the passer so they pick up the flight of the ball at the earliest stage. I would probably still be inclined to achieve a similar effect by using smaller balls, balls of a dull colour that are harder to see, or balls with numbers or letters on that the players have to read out before they catch them.

                  
Patching both eyes, otherwise known as blindfolding, certainly has a place for enhancing kinaesthetic feedback. But that’s for another day.

David Donner

Retinal imaging able to detect Alzheimer’s

Retinal imaging able to detect Alzheimer’s

The Chimp Paradox

I’ve talked a lot about the conscious and subconscious parts of the brain, but there’s another part known as the limbic system. I tend to think of this as an alarm system: all sensory information goes to this part of the brain first and is scanned for potential dangers.

This system was great when our ancestors were living in the jungle and could be eaten by a predator at any moment, but can cause problems in our modern lives. So an opening batsman preparing to face a fast bowler will have made a conscious decision to play cricket that day. The precise movements required to play a shot at the right time to hit the ball successfully depends on the subconscious brain. But as the batsman watches the fast bowler marking their run-up, the limbic system may well be sending out alarm messages, such as “He looks big; the ball’s likely to be coming at me very fast; I didn’t do very well when I played here last time”.

In his book “The Chimp Paradox”, Dr Steve Peters refers to this limbic system as “The Inner Chimp”. As Dr Peters acknowledges, it may not be anatomically or philosophically correct to describe the inner chimp as a separate entity from the “human” brain. But it seems to be an incredibly powerful and useful way of thinking about it. The book also has chapters on achieving success, confidence and happiness, so it really could change your life.

If you find that you have over-reacted to a situation with an emotional response that you later regret, you can blame it on your inner chimp. But it’s like having a pet dog: although you aren’t your dog, you are still responsible for how your dog behaves. So you have to be able to control your inner chimp as you’re responsible for it.

It probably won’t work if you just try and ignore your chimp. You can manage it, however, by setting up default behaviours such as pre-shot rituals in sports such as tennis or golf which enable you to carry out the task before the chimp starts acting up.
 
Recent examples of sportsmen whose chimps seem to be out of control include Andy Murray and Luis Suarez. Of course, since Dr Peters has worked with Suarez, he’s not exactly the best advert when he carries on biting players.

In the end, though, the player has to decide to help himself. Unfortunately, in the case of Suarez, he decided to help himself to a piece of Chiellini’s shoulder.

David Donner

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!