Vision Training

SpineDoc,

I feel proper, baseball-specific vison training has the ability to increase results faster than any other one single training aspect.

Sadly, I feel the large majority get it wrong. In your first example I simply do not understand why the players have to worry about color of the ball. Does the color of the ball change from pitch to pitch? Sure, color is one aspect of vison, but not applicable to baseball/softball.

Reading of the numbers on the tennis ball would be cool, but I would want to see that done in person. I tried this out a few years back after reading about it. Our BP guy was throwing maybe 75-80 and we had some pretty good D1 athletes who had no idea what number was written. Maybe I wrote the number too small, who knows.

I like your second example. I use a version of this with my guys. Be sure to do vision training with a bat in their hands and not squared up to what you are focusing on (such as a computer screen - another thing that makes no sense).

Ever since HS when I started to "lose" pitches on the outside 1/3 of the plate I have been intrigued about how to improve it.

Have you tried anything else re: vision training?

I am in the beginning stages of trying to develop a program with and Optemtrist, but it feels like we are banging our heads against the wall.

What I use primarily at this time are the above mentioned tools, as well as the swiftstik. I have never worked with a hitter whose batting average hasn't gone up with training with the swiftstik (or a piece of PVC pipe).

As far as the why the use of colors, I think it is only used to give the athlete something smaller to focus on. But that is only my opinion.

When I developed my vison training program I ran it by my optometrist (who got me to 20/15 vision through the correct contact fitting - harder than it sounds with my given eyesight). He thought it was great and we did some tests as well.

I felt it was good to have reassurance and credibility from an expert, especially since I was in college at the time and for whatever reason most people associate knowledge with age.

I like the swiftstik (or as you mentioned anything that essentially does the same thing). I use it quite often.

Jon
Is your vision training program on your webstie anywhere?

I only have included it in my hitting program. I don't offer it seperately.

Jon and Spinedoc, my son has amblyopia (commonly referred to a lazy eye) and we do a lot of vision therapy because of that. We mainly do it because of school work but use baseball as a hook to keep it going. I know from personal experience with my son that it does work.
A couple of the things we do are:

Brock String excercises: A 10' length of string with about 5 beads of different color on the string placed an equal length apart. Hold one end of the string to your nose the other end is tied off. Look down the string at the different beads and you should see two strings converging into the bead. You should be able to do this for all the beads on the string. You should also hop around don't always go from bead to bead. Used to help improve binocular vision.

Soft toss with plastic golf balls using two different colors. Tell the hitter to only hit one color. Helps with visual processing. We use a mauer quick swing that we have for this, able to hide the different colored ball better.

We do a lot of different excercises these are only a couple of them that we do. Only one of the excercises is computer based that we do. Because of my son's situation we try and spend about 20 minutes 4-5 days a week on vision therapy. All of this was setup through our optometrist, we found one who does vision therapy, not all do. Our optometrist also tries to include as many things as he can that will help his baseball, taking traditional excercises and modifying them for that purposes. Example being having him do certain things on a wobble board since you do not play standing still.

Hope this helps if if you want some more information I will be glad to get as much as I can.

JB's Dad,

Great info. Thanks for sharing.

In additon to instable surfaces, I also make sure my hitters are not squared up when doing vision training because a hitter is not squared up when he hits.

Also, vision training is extremely overlooked in pitching. Pitchers can make tremendous strides in location and strikes/balls ratio.

JB'sDad, I sent you a PM

There is a great website full of vision training tools. www.slowthegamedown.com

Spinedoc I just sent you a PM and an e-mail