How I Became Radicalized About Eyesight in Sports

Had lasik.
Also had a spot on optical nerve and shingles in my eye.
Spent alot of time with many different eye doctor's and many tests.
I still have 20/20 vision
Which is a miracle.
Eyes are fascinating
Great video
More on this topic !

I think one of the worst aspects of our current education system is it has a tendency to beat the wonder out of kids. You are smart if you can repeat the truth the teacher tells you.

Great job not allowing that to happen to you.

One interesting point was how execution (like, just doing anything in a sports context) benefits from the lack of eye dominance or at least a minimal degree of eye dominance. I remember some NBA players practicing with strobe glasses which would momentarily blackout and obscure the vision for one (or both?) of the eyes. I think Michael Jordan was the first to start using it and it was inspired by the momentary flash of light that would occur when players made a shot attempt. Jordan was finding himself distracted by it so he used the strobe glasses to acclimate himself. I wonder if they also minimized the degree of eye dominance.

Good video. Jamarr chase is the best receiver in football, though

Incredibly interesting. I’m a high performance Gymnastics coach and have seen some great improvements in my athletes ability to track where they are in the air over the last two years when I really doubled down on visual tracking and cues.

Watching the Olympics recently Male Gymnast “Jake Jarmin” I believe is another good case for your theory. Jake has some of the best awareness in the world and is able to do the hardest tumbling in the sport. Which watching him wait for his score and talk to his teammates I noticed his eyes darted around all over the place, even to the extreme corners of his eyes (like a “side eye”) instead of moving his head. I believe this mobility of his eyes allow him to spot and track the floor earlier than other gymnasts. Super interesting stuff

This was great!!! An athlete who can see the whole field will dominate

Great video

You NEEED to look into getting some esports pros for testing. That part about Gretzky convinced me. So much of taught skills in fighting games comes from prediction, from things like tempo, reading the pattern of your opponent, etc. Overwatch, so much of playing is about reading angles in terms of, "where is my cover defending me from? What am I open to, and closed from?". Having tried picking up both, you genuinely do see the game differently in a way similar to what he describes, where you don't understand why certain things are done from opponents or players. I know they already have cross-over, but it's unexplored. I thinking finding pros in those disciplines would be more accessible at least, if you wanted people that may excell in these sorts of proficiencies.

I could tell when I needed a new prescription if I started hitting like garbage in baseball. I’d go from like .400 to .200 over a year and I’d get the new prescription and I’d be back up towards .400.

Banger video. Subscriber earned.

When I try that test both eyes closing puts the target out of frame

Jayden Daniels uses VR to improve his complete vision to the game, and it completely showed through the season. No matter how good or athletic you are, it’s how you see the game that puts you above everyone else. It’s Chess, your vision helps you make more coordinated decisions in a heat of the moment. Almost like you seeing it before it happen

Dude look Ben stoeger vision focus. World champion marksmen built his craft on vision focus

Answer me this: if eyesight is the key to being a great athlete, how come there are so many stories of American war heroes who had to cheat on the eye exam to get into the military? One of which may be the best marksman ever. Ching Lee.

The Fat Electrician has several videos on guys like Ching and their stories all start the same. Farm boys who cheated the eye exam.

Learning to jiggle has improved my skills of dribbling a basketball more than anything else. Learning to track several objects with my peripheral vision has been valuable outside of sports. I occasionally train to do skills with as little visual information as I can muster.

WOW THIS IS SO WELL PUT TOGETHER

Get to the fucking point already dude holy shit 4/5ths of the words you say do not need to be said

Real life sharingan??

Great video. I play casual 7 a side footabll (soccer) and every since i went slightly short sighted aged 24 my performance has dipped when playing at night under the headlights when my eyesight is at its worst

I was pretty horrible at baseball as a kid and this makes me wonder if constantly losing my glasses played into that lol.

Also, that COD bit has me thinking about other games. There's some Counter-Strike pros like YEKINDAR who play with their screens ridiculously close to their face. Idk how those guys look at their minimap but I'm sure they will notice every pixel that changes when an enemy walks into their crosshair. Then over in Valorant, I used to play with color-blind settings on because it made enemies easier to see. That's a trick I picked up from watching Hiko, a former pro who actually is colorblind. Could be placebo but I do think I played a lot better that way.

Do you have counter examples

Banger. Also, tremendous ending on the “point” of the internet being good-faith, well-informed discourse and research!

More on Gaming. Look up Faker. He is unquestionably the goat of League, which is the biggest event sport in the world. Just look up his screen during high-level competition matches.
Something very similar is Rhythm game players. For this, I recommend looking up high-level Osu or Type Mania videos. Their ability to see and process incredible amounts of visual input seems impossible at times. Lastly, look at any Starcraft 2 pro match and see how much shit is happening.

The part most relevant to this video is that the average person could approach these levels of skill and talent with enough dedicated practice. While maybe not the same tier as pros, at least for Rhythm games, you can reach near the peak.
It means that at least for processing speeds and pattern recognition, you can train that. You don't need to know anything about any of these games to follow this btw. Just visualize things appearing on screen before disappearing and having to click them when they pop up. The ability to process that and respond is called sight reading. It's likely the highest level of talent one can have in a Rhythm game, where you are unaware of any patterns or certainties but still are able to respond to inhuman levels of speed.

And while these aren't traditional sports, they highlight one side of this discussion. Because none of these games require looking farther than right in front of them, the entirety of their vision skills are measured on timing and processing.
Most gamers are keenly aware of how vision impacts competition in video games, whether they know it or not.


And even beyond just the eyes, it's been proven and widely known that hand eye coordination is a massive part of gaming. And so many people hear this and only think about the brain processing power and the actual motor skills involved with moving. But "eye" is the other half of that phrase for a reason. The ability to as quickly and effectively gather as much information as possible is what starts that process of reacting. Light moves faster than anything. We will see something before we feel it or hear it. We see things before our brain has time to even know what we are looking at

My eyes glaze over and roll back in my skull. My limbs become numb and a separate tactical stategical entity overtakes my mortal coil to possess me to achieve extra-sapien feats of nature.

My vision is terrible. And I can't catch/throw/dodge. Depth perception is particularly important in sports.

I will say about my vision when I play basketball, when the ball is in my hand, my court vision gets really small. I can be looking at one teammate, and the one that is within my field of vision is essentially invisible to me. Ball out of my hand I can see both teammates in the same situation. Setting screens, pointing to the open man, seeing what the defense is doing...all good. Going off screens, finding the open man, seeing what the defense is doing when I'm the ball handler...I hope they suck at defense, and that I can get rid of the ball if I don't have a shot. Playing defense, I thrive.

Colorblind anecdote. I coach high school volleyball, and one of my assistant coaches is colorblind. We were in another team's gym, and the court lines were light gray, and were very hard to see from a distance against the wood grain of the floor. We are discussing the lines, and colorblind assistant says that for him they are really easy to see because there was a much bigger contrast than other lines in the gym.

That dominant eye test is wild. I always knew what my dominant eye is, but seeing an object disappear was crazy.

Thanks for the reminder at the end to create more and consume less. 🤘

With regards to training vision for sports excellence, I was told that one coach for the United States Women's Softball team came up with a practice to help players see pitches better. His scheme was to paint numbers on tennis balls in different colors, then he shot these balls past his batters at around 200 miles per hour and told them to call out the number and color painted on each ball.

At first, the batters found this task impossible, but after days and weeks of repetition, their brains adapted and they began to be able to see the numbers and colors on the balls as they flew past them. Now when they watched normal 80 - 90 mph fastballs, they felt like they were seeing the pitches in slow motion. Apparently that team won the gold medal for women's softball in the Olympics.

If you continue this story and research, I'd be interested to hear how Steph Curry, Roger Federer, and Serena Williams stack up with regards to eyesight. My guess is they also all have highly developed eagle eyes!

Keep up the good work!

Gotta thank the OG of the quiet eye, Joan Vickers for all her work paving the way, and bringing this subject to light

Both my eyes put the object on the edge so it appears centered.

Never been a big sports guy but I couldn't not watch this whole video, very well made

He watched the McKelvin video

Man I love the genuine clear statements of appreciation directly to the Internet

My Chargers getting cooked in the Thumbnail.

"Aren't they two of the best?" Nichlous and Tiger? No.

They are the two best.

I need glasses for everyday use (would need to squint to read a book without them), and played hs and circuit basketball without goggles or contacts. While i don’t have numbers to back it up, I don’t think better eyesight would’ve made me a better player.

While sight may be important, I think it is still just one aspect of athletic performance meaning a lack of it can be compensated by other things like muscle memory/practice or being more athletic. Not downplaying its importance, but in a situation where an athlete is struggling i don’t think something like lasik or getting contact lenses would be the catalyst for improved performance (unless you’re actually blind of course).

no chapters... not listening to allat

As a kid i played baseball and basketball, and i was always slightly below mediocre. i put in so much work and felt like i could never improve. i also had bad eyesight, but because of the shape of my eyes couldn’t wear contacts, and i didn’t want to wear glasses while doing sports. i decided to start track and now im actually a pretty good runner, im gonna start running at the collegiate level next year. i don’t think its a coincidence that the first sport i play that doesn’t require eye sight is the first sport im good at.

Except Steph was the best shooter of all time with bad eyesight

Optometrist here— glad to see the hype coming through!

hey great video anthony, got a sub from me, i think you can definitely extrapolate this to visual calculus being something that makes a great athlete as well

Good video, but outro was crazy long

i can see this dudes eyes reading a script

Quiet eye training is a huge part of pool/billiards fundamentals for another example

Algorithm knew this would interest a super smash bros melee player

Aim is just a vision of the future that one intends to realize, and I think it ought to b broken down into logical steps. We first go through sensory data COLLECTION, then we must have RETENTION of data as we make CALCULATION, and then only meticulously focused, accurate and undeviated execution of that future vision will determine how well we "aimed. Thats what I believe aim is and the concept of the "quiet eye" seems related. Idk if anyones agrees orr??

Nice video dude!

I think the stat is 8% of men are colorblind, because it's genetically very unlikely for a woman to be colorblind. Of course for the discussion of men's sports that's not really relevant. I highly doubt that colorblindness would be advantageous in golf, but I also don't think it's likely to be a disadvantage either; it's not like the ball is red or something.

When you say vision can be trained, what is the extent of that? Don’t some people need glasses? Can they train past that need or are they doomed to have subpar vision?