Sports coaches, performers and scientists are constantly on the lookout for new ways to enhance sports performance and gain competitive advantage. One of the latest techniques on offer is visual training - a series of repetitive eye exercises prescribed by sports optometrists in a bid to improve basic visual functions and, consequently, sports performance.
Despite the growing use of these programmes and the strong claims made on their behalf, the evidence supporting them has never been better than anecdotal. And now a carefully designed experimental study has come to the damning conclusion that the Emperor's new clothes don't actually exist! Australian researchers Bruce Abernethy and Joanne Wood found 'no evidence that the visual training programmes led to improvements in either vision or motor performance above and beyond those resulting simply from test familiarity'.

In their study 40 male and female undergraduates were split into four different groups, as follows:

1. Visual training group using exercises from Revien and Gabor's Sports Vision programme for athletes, with four 20-minute visual training sessions and one 20-minute motor practice session (using tennis forehand drives) per week for four weeks;
2. Visual training group using Revien's Eyerobics video-based training programme, following the same protocol as group 1;
3. Reading group, spending four 20-minute sessions per week reading about and watching televised tennis matches, with one motor practised session, as for group 1;
4. Control group, receiving no training of any kind with just one 20-minute practise session per week.

Groups 1-3 were given preliminary statements about the expected positive effects on sports performance of the training they were undertaking, to give them the same expectations of benefits.
Various visual and motor parameters were tested before and after the four-week study and the results compared. If generalised visual training programmes were indeed effective, the researchers would have expected to see significant improvements in both vision and motor performance in the visual training groups. But these improvements were not evident.
'Neither the Sports Vision programme by Group 1 nor the Eyerobics programme experienced by Group 2 were able to produce persistent improvements in vision or in motor performance that could be attributed to selective exposure to the visual training,' the researchers report.
'Pre-to-post-training improvements in performance were evident on some measuresÉ but these improvements were experienced by all participants in the experiment and were due, therefore, to test familiarity and not to the visual training programmes.'

Why don't these programmes work? Probably, say the researchers, for the fundamental reason that 'they attempt to train general visual factors that are now known not to be the limiting factor to sports performance'.
Abernethy and Wood conclude somewhat mildly that generalised visual training programmes of the type advocated by sports optometrists should be used 'with cautionÉ These programmes do not appear to provide the improvements in either basic visual function or motor performance relevant to sport that they claim to produce.'

J Sports Sci 2001 Mar 19(3) p203-22

Isabel Walker