DMH helping athletes "Keep their eyes on the ball"

The DMH Sports Enhancement Center now offers Sports Vision Training to help athletes gain a split-second edge over their competition. It is clear that efficient visual skills are a critical part of sports; approximately 80 percent of all information that athletes receive during competition is visual. Professional athletes and their coaches have found that vision plays an important role in sports performance. It may be the one thing that keeps a good athlete from being an exceptional one and it has the potential to make an excellent athlete into an elite athlete.

"The concept of the program is simple," explains DMH Sports Medicine Medical Director Wendell Becton, MD. "The eyes feed information to the brain and the brain interprets that information and sets the body in motion. If our eyes send an inaccurate message or the brain interprets the information wrong, it sets up the athlete for failure."

"This program was developed to train the eyes and the brain together to allow for quicker decisions and better reponses. It is an excellent program for football, baseball, softball, tennis, basketball, hockey, and any other activity requiring hand eye coordination."

Just like exercise and practice can increase the athlete’s strength and speed, sports vision training can likewise improve an athlete’s visual fitness. Each athlete will train for one hour, two times a week for six weeks to develop various visual skills. The DMH Sports Vision Program focuses on exercises that improve depth perception, eye tracking, peripheral vision, eye focusing, binocular vision, stamina, hand-eye coordination, and visual concentration.

"The optimal time to begin this program is in the off-season and it’s very affordable," Dr. Becton says. "This is an excellent compliment to our hitting, throwing, running, and hockey Acceleration programs that we already use to increase speed, power and agility."

Sports vision training is a very new and interesting field in athletic performance enhancement. The staff at DMH Sports Medicine was fortunate enough to train with the United States Air Force Academy last year in Colorado Springs, CO. Dr. Becton and his staff spent more than a week working and observing in the Academy’s Human Performance Laboratory.

"It was very exciting and busy, almost every collegiate sport at the Air Force Academy used the sports vision program," Dr. Becton says. "We are excited to begin providing this cutting edge sports enhancement technology for athletes in central Illinois and beyond. Sports vision training has the capability to revolutionize the way athletes train and brings a whole new meaning to the phrase Keep your eyes on the ball."

The DMH Sports Enhancement Center is located on 2122 North 27th Street, in Decatur Illinois. For more information you may call 217-423-4296.

Kris Knox, MS, ATC/L has been a member of the DMH Sports Medicine team since 1995. He received a bachelors and masters degree from the University of Illinois in kinesiology and exercise physiology. He also has a masters from Illinois State University in athletic training.He has been working at the Sports Enhancement Center since it opened in October 2001.

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