There are numerous ways to improve your eyesight to gain skills that are relevant for any sport. Share the following tips from All About Vision with your kids to help them improve their sport performance by strengthening their eyes.
Eye Strengthening Tips and Skills for Kids in Sports
- Focus flexibility. Practice quickly switching your focus from the distance to a close object.
- Peripheral awareness. Learn to see what is going on around you without moving your head by trying to follow a video on your computer screen while your head is turned to either side.
- Dynamic visual acuity. If you have a record player at home, you can easily test your ability to focus on a fast moving object. Print out letters in different sizes and place them on the turntable. Try to identify the letters at increasing speeds and decreasing sizes.
- Depth perception. Improve your ability to make spatial judgments by trying to cap a pen while holding it at arm’s length.
- Color vision. Color deficiency can make playing certain sports very challenging. Although there is no way to gain this ability, tinted lenses can help by filtering some colors and enhancing others.
Determining Eye Dominance
Just like you have a dominant hand, you have one eye that focuses harder than the other to see objects. If the sport you practice requires good aim, eye dominance is very important. Eye dominance does not always correlate to hand dominance, but you can find out which is your dominant eye through a simple test from About Health:
Extend your arms and use your thumbs and forefingers to create a circle around an object about 15 to 20 feet away. Close each eye in turn. With one eye the object will remain in the center of the circle — this is your dominant eye.
It is essential to keep your kids safe during sports both from injuries and from UV rays when they are playing outdoors. Check out our sports styles in the Real Kids collection to find a pair of shades with 100 percent UV protection and impact-resistant polycarbonate lenses.