The strength, determination and effort of your child are important for helping them do well in sports and games, but a small compromise in their vision can ruin their overall performance. Your child’s ability to perform well in sports is hugely dependent on their visual skills. The physical fitness of your child will be compromised if they are not visually fit. Most of the children who had problems with seeing or reading at school have also been found to have difficulties in their sports performance. The vision problems that impair the reading and learning abilities of your child can also affect their sports performance.
A comprehensive eye test can help in determining any vision problems that are affecting their sports. It is important to watch out for signs of difficulties while performing sports due to vision problems as it can occur in children and or adults. If your child seems to be facing any difficulties performing well in sports or games, you should seek the help of an eye specialist to undergo sports vision testing.
Problems to Watch out for
Children need vision skills like focusing, eye teamwork, depth perception, eye tracking and peripheral vision to perform well in sports. Children who struggle in sports with a vision problem may frequently strikeout in baseball, drop passes in football or basketball, miss short putts in golf, throw inaccurate football passes, have a poor shooting percentage in basketball, trip over their skates in hockey, stumble doing a pompom routine or consistently misjudge hitting a tennis ball.
You may assume that your child is having a vision problem if they show general signs like having a lack of balance, rhythm and timing and concentration, clumsiness, careless steps, blunt reflexes, poor hand-eye coordination, performance inconsistency, getting frustrated when playing sports, experiencing headaches and fatigue, little improvement with practice and making errors or sitting on the bench more often. If your child enjoys sports but seems to be having some difficulties in being the best athlete it can be a potential sign of a sports vision problem. A vision problem may keep your child from performing well in sports.
Ensure Regular Eye Testing
If your child is active in sports, it is important to regularly evaluate their sports adeptness and explore ways to refine it. Children with a 20/20 vision can still be suffering from functional vision problems that obstruct them from performing their best in sports activities. A basic eye examination doesn’t test for any of the near-vision skills that your child requires to succeed in sports. This is why it is important to regularly undergo comprehensive eye test near me to stay ahead of vision problems that may be contributing to your child’s sports woes. An evaluation of the complete visual skill of your child will be the first step to identifying any deficiency of necessary visual skills or determining whether any sports-specific visual skills need to be enhanced.
Importance of Eye-Hand Coordination
You should be aware that the coordination of your child’s hands and eyes is important for accomplishing sports skills. Eye-hand coordination itself is a self-explanatory function crucial for skills like precisely catching a ball, throwing an accurate pass, swishing consecutive free throws or putting the bat on the ball. The strength of your child’s visual connection between eyes, brain and hands impacts the effective eye-hand coordination of your child.
How Vision Therapy Can Help in Sports Vision
Do you ever notice that a vision problem is blocking your child from outperforming their competition? A professionally supervised vision training program by a pediatric eye specialist near me may help to improve their visual skills to perform more effectively in sports. In some cases, practice and hard work can improve eye-hand coordination, but vision therapy is the most effective program that can ideally strengthen your child’s visual system. Similar to physiotherapy for sports injury, vision therapy trains the brain to control the eyes to function optimally. Children who already have good visual skills can benefit from vision therapy to improve visual efficiency and eye-hand coordination.
Once a diagnosis is made, the eye specialist can recommend a suitable vision therapy program that includes exercises like drills with balls and other objects, computer games or activities with prisms and lenses. Vision therapy has been attributed its credit in improving the ability to accurately catch or throw a ball and perform consistently.
What every successful athlete you know would have in common is an exception of hand-eye coordination. If your child is interested in athletics, you should start vision therapy for them at the best eye hospital near me so that they will have the ability to achieve greater success.
Give us a call to schedule a vision evaluation for your child and to get recommendations for an optimal vision therapy program to improve your child’s sports performance.