Sports Vision Training is not about practicing hand to eye tasks.
Sports Vision Training is about learning how to use your visual system to greater advantage during activities where the vision guides body movement through space and with respect to other stationary and moving objects.
Swansea University Rugby Team are preparing for the Welsh Varsity in a groundbreaking and innovative way.
Eurfron Nyhan and the team at Sports Vision Wales in Cardiff have been working with the Varsity squad to improve awareness and speed of information processing in their peripheral vision. Sports vision performance training is a technique currently being explored by the Welsh senior team in their bid for World Cup success in September.
For the last year the Dragons Academy have teamed up with Sports Vision Wales to develop their vision skills to help them compete at the highest level of the game. The idea came after the Dragons Academy Manager, Will Thomas, visited the IMG Academy in Florida a year ago as part of a WRU and Under Armour sponsored fact finding mission to research training methods and techniques from other sports. ‘Although we found that rugby shared many common training methods and techniques with the American and International sports serviced through the IMG Academy, the one area that me and my colleagues had no prior knowledge of was ‘Vision Training’. It seems obvious as to the merits of developing an elite athletes vision in sports such as rugby, football, tennis, shooting, baseball etc.. but it was less obvious as to how you can measure a baseline of vision performance, set a programme to deliberately enhance the athletes vision and how you can measure vision improvement.’
A small sample of the Sports Vision Performance Training activities demonstrated by Craig Atwell, Jamie Sollis, Jonathan Evans, Lewis Robling and Rhydian Wilson of Newport Gwent Dragons Academy