Seeing Smarter: Training Vision for Sports and Performance

It’s said that the most elite of athletes have the ability to bend time with the game seeming to slow around them.

It’s a phenomenon apparent to anyone who has watched the extraordinary Lionel Messi, often described as the ‘complete footballer’. Similarly, Formula One great Sir Jackie Stewart once spoke of having “very clear vision, almost in slow motion, of going through that corner” despite travelling at over 300 km/hour.¹ Tennis legend John McEnroe has reported he felt time slow as he was about to hit the ball.¹

For athletes, the difference between reacting and anticipating can define performance – and according to those working in sports vision, that difference may come down to how the visual system is trained.

“When we can process visual information quicker… players will often say it feels like the game slows down,” explained New Zealand optometrist Renee Edgar, from Wellington’s McClellan Grimmer Edgar, who has worked with some of NZ’s leading cricketers, including the Wellington Firebirds.

This idea sits at the heart of sports vision training. While traditional eye care focuses on clarity, sports vision extends into processing speed, decision making, and the ability to interpret visual information under pressure.

More Than Eyesight

Sports vision is not limited to visual acuity alone. It encompasses a range of skills, including eye movements, peripheral awareness, and the integration of visual input with motor responses.

“Vision leads the body,” Ms Edgar said, describing how visual input drives movement and reaction.

Dr Robert Ng, a Teaching Fellow and Clinic Supervisor at the University of Auckland who also practises privately at Frith and Laird Optometrists, is another optometrist who works with elite athletes in New Zealand. He’s worked with the Blues Super Rugby team and Auckland Cricket, as well as individual athletes from the NZ national hockey team. He describes sports vision as the clinical application of vision science in a sporting context, drawing on core optometric principles but applying them in dynamic environments.

“Every optometrist can work on the basics of clarity and vision. They know the skills to work on how the two eyes work together. So, they can definitely offer training there,” Dr Ng said.

“And optometrists can also offer specialty lenses. So again, if [a patient was involved in sports] shooting, for example, tinted lenses could be prescribed to improve the contrast. That’s definitely within the scope of a normal optometrist.

“But beyond that, they can also do things like visualisation training… there are specific tools that work on reaction time and eye coordination.”

Also working from the ground to assess and improve sports vision is United States ophthalmologist Professor Daniel Laby (sportsvision.nyc). Considered the global authority on sports and performance vision, Prof Laby has worked with a number of Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association (NBA), and National Hockey League teams in the US, the US Olympic Team, and Premier League Football teams in the United Kingdom.

It is useful to think of sports vision as a pyramid, Prof Laby explained.

“If you have a strong base, you will be able to build a nice, broad, tall pyramid that’s stable…

“The bottom level of the pyramid relates to how well each eye, individually, can see targets. Specifically, the ability to see small targets, faint targets (low contrast) and to be able to correctly identify the targets when only having a brief look/glimpse. We can test for this with each eye separately and identify issues and make corrections.

“After we are sure that the bottom level is optimal, we test how the two eyes are working together. This involves testing the depth perception or stereo vision ability. If a problem is found, we can correct it or optimise it.

“The next level relates to how the visual information is processed, mainly to create a go or no-go decision. This area also involves testing the brain’s ability to direct attention to a specific target in anticipation of an event or an action, as well as minimising any negative biases that may affect the quality and the speed of that visual information processing.

“Lastly, with a visual-based decision, the athlete must make a motor action to carry out that decision – here we look at things like eye-hand or foot-eye coordination, reaction times, etc – all of which can be tested and trained.”²

In his work with professional athletes, Prof Laby attempts to maximise every level of the pyramid, recognising that the vision needs of athletes differ, depending on their sport.

Everybody should be thinking about how the brain works and how vision works, and how you can use your vision to perform better.

Multidisciplinary Approach

While rooted in optometry and ophthalmology, sports vision integrates principles from other health and performance disciplines to optimise an athlete’s visual system. It regularly draws on neuroscience, psychology, and physical rehabilitation to ensure that “the eyes guide the body”.³

“There’s a strong overlap with say sports medicine, strength and conditioning training, and sports psychology as well,” Dr Ng explained.

“For example, one aspect of sports vision might be visualisation… seeing things so often that you get pattern recognition. This is where sports psychology comes in; visualising, or mentally imagining what’s happening. There is a lot of overlap,” he said.

Prof Laby agreed. “I call it vision science or visual performance more than ophthalmology or optometry or behavioural optometry or vision training or whatever,” Prof Laby said. “The problem is a lot of those terms and names kind of put people into thinking in one direction.

“We probably have the closest crossover with optometry because I’m very much interested in binocular vision, stereopsis, how the brain uses the eyes together to function optimally. And that’s similar in optometry.

“Everybody should be thinking about how the brain works and how vision works, and how you can use your vision to perform better. And you can call the field whatever you want to call it. But to me, it’s a matter of understanding vision and how vision plays a role in our lives,” Prof Laby said.

What’s Involved?

As Dr Ng mentioned earlier, aspects of vision training fall into the scope of strength and conditioning. Ms Edgar said she often works with strobe lights during regular practice sessions.

“The players generally tend to love doing work with the strobes. Even if it’s something as simple as just catching and throwing a ball, we’ll put strobes on and we’ll go to all sorts of different levels.

“Once we take the strobes off, all of a sudden, it just feels like that ball is going super slow – Steph Curry in the NBA uses these as his warmup drill as well to help feel like that hoop of the basket is bigger.

“Then I also do work around eye-hand reaction speeds. We do decision making with that in terms of go/no go situations. We’re just trying to build visual activities that challenge the athlete enough that there’s some failure. That’s horrible for them because they’re obviously highly critical of any failure, but it’s so challenging that when they get out onto the field or wherever they’re playing, actually what they’re doing becomes quite simplistic,” Ms Edgar said.

She said there are “areas for opportunity” for vision training in all sports “but they’re different in every sport, so you can’t do everything the same”.

“You must be able to understand what those crucial visual skills are. That doesn’t mean you have to understand the sport, but you have to have an athlete who can really describe what they need in a way that allows you to work with them.”

The Quiet Eye and Peripheral Awareness

One concept in sports vision is the ‘quiet eye’ – the ability to stabilise gaze just before executing a movement.

Dr Ng describes this as particularly relevant in sports requiring precision, such as golf putting or free-throw shooting in basketball.

By reducing unnecessary eye movement and focusing attention, athletes may improve accuracy and consistency.

Professor Laby said the Quiet Eye is a measurable difference between elite and less successful performers.

“We have guys who did 30 out of 30 successful free throws… and they were looking dead on at the same spot on the rim,” he said, speaking about professional basketball players.

In contrast, less successful players showed unstable gaze patterns. “Their spots are looking all over… no quietness to their gaze,” he said.

This stabilisation of gaze just before action appears to improve both accuracy and consistency.

Ms Edgar similarly emphasises the importance of gaze control, noting that athletes are encouraged to use their peripheral vision more effectively, rather than relying solely on central fixation.

“Look at somebody like [Portuguese footballer] Cristiano Ronaldo. They did an eye tracking experiment on him, probably about a decade ago now. When he is in control of the ball, he very rarely looks at the ball. He knows where the ball is because he’s using all of his vision, not just that central part. He’s using the peripheral vision to keep track of where the ball is and where his feet are. He’s then using his central vision to get a bit more of a gauge of hip and knee positioning and where the weight distribution of the opposition player is so he can go around them,” Ms Edgar said.

“There’s an element of this Quiet Eye concept… the more still you can keep the eyes just before performing a really important visual [task] or an important motor response, the better you’ll be able to do that… so we then encourage vision training activities [so athletes]… use their peripheral vision much more.”

By reducing unnecessary eye movement and focusing attention, athletes may improve accuracy and consistency.

Proving the Benefits

Despite growing interest, the question of whether vision training directly improves performance remains difficult to answer.

“That’s the holy grail of sports vision,” Prof Laby said.

While clinicians in the field – including those who spoke to mivision – can all provide multiple anecdotal reports of improved performance following training or correction, robust scientific evidence is difficult.

“The truth of the matter is there is no good scientific publication that shows [vision] training makes you perform better in your sport,” Prof Laby said.

Even establishing a relationship between visual skills and on-field performance is challenging, requiring large sample sizes of 300–500 players, he said.

To take that further, and demonstrate the impact of vision training on performance would require similarly large cohorts, trained in a consistent way – something that is difficult to achieve in practice.

And, of course, part of the challenge lies in the complexity of sport itself. Performance outcomes are influenced by multiple variables, not all of them measurable, making it difficult to isolate the impact of vision training.

Wider Application

Our interviewees agreed that vision training should not just be reserved for the elite athlete.

“I do see a lot of benefits for the weekend warrior,” Ms Edgar said, citing pickleball, which requires fast reaction times on a small court, as a growing community sport that would benefit from vision training for players.

“I see a huge amount of development, more with our up-and-coming young talent in their teenage years, where they still have that neuroplasticity around how things are coming at them to make changes.

“To be honest with you, anybody who’s motivated, anybody who wants to do a little bit better, absolutely could benefit from vision training.”

Prof Laby said elite athletes are “the banner, the headline… everyone likes to hear about that” but insists the principles are just as relevant to the everyday.

“I call the field not ‘sports vision’, I call it ‘sports and performance vision’ because if you’re in the military, if you’re a police officer… everything we’re doing with the athletes really applies to you.

“And, frankly, if you drive an automobile, in my view, this applies to you. If someone has fast reaction times and has really good sharpness of vision for small targets that are moving fast, they only see for a short time, they’re likely going to have less accidents.”

Prof Laby said the challenge will be presenting the benefits of sports and performance vision training, and persuading people it’s for their benefit.

“That’s the challenge. And that’s … I’m getting tired. I’m 65 years old. I’m not going to do this for 35 more years until I’m 100. And the next generation needs to pick that up and bring it to the general population to make it in their benefit, not just for the athletes as I’ve done.”

References

1. Taylor S. From Messi to Mika Häkkinen, how top athletes can ‘slow down time’, The Conversation, Feb 2025, available at: theconversation.com/from-messi-to-mika-hakkinen-how-top-athletes-can-slow-down-time-249780# [accessed April 2026].
2. Laby D. A guide to incredible sports vision performance, available at: drdanlaby.com/a-guide-to-incredible-sports-vision-performance/ [accessed April 2026].
3. Buscemi A, Mondelli F, Coco M, et al. Role of sport vision in performance: systematic review. J Funct Morphol Kinesiol. 2024 May 23;9(2):92. doi: 10.3390/jfmk9020092.