Effects of Sports Vision Training on Peripheral Awareness

Background: This study will examine the relationship between sports vision training and peripheral awareness. Peripheral awareness is essential to an athlete’s performance. Whether it’s noticing a teammate’s location earlier in basketball or noticing a defender’s location earlier in soccer or hockey, peripheral awareness enhances one’s athletic performance. Noticing the location of a teammate or defender even milliseconds quicker can improve an athlete’s performance by making a difference in a possession which can lead to a difference in a game. The visual system may be trained to enhance peripheral awareness. Methods: An athlete in the age range of 18 to 30 years old was recruited for this experiment. Pretesting was performed on the subject to measure their baseline peripheral awareness capabilities. Training was then performed on each subject through 8 training sessions at 1 hour/session within a 4-week time period. Several exercises were completed during each training session. Results: A 10 percent improvement in the pre and posttests of peripheral awareness was achieved. Conclusions: Peripheral awareness can be trained and improved. There are anatomical restrictions limiting improvements to peripheral awareness. This enhanced peripheral awareness may translate to enhanced performance of their sport.