Vision

[rtr]

Although this article is primarily about golf it mentions shooting once and I think applies.

Curious if anyone has had lasik and if it helped their shooting. My vision sucks in one eye and this article makes me think about lasik.

GOLF JOURNAL

By JOHN PAUL NEWPORT

The Eyes Have It

New research aims to help players focus on the key role of vision

October 27, 2007; Page W1

For most of us subprofessionals, the chief advantage of great vision in golf would seem to be finding lost balls in the woods. Distance markers and laser range finders take the visual guesswork out of judging approach shots, and up on the green, who but Mr. Magoo can't see the hole?

But almost everything I thought I knew about this subject turns out to be wrong. Superior vision is a huge advantage in golf, especially when it comes to putting. Many of the world's best players, including Tiger Woods and seven other PGA Tour winners this year (Vijay Singh, Fred Funk and Masters Champion Zach Johnson among them) have had Lasik surgery to correct their eyesight to Top Gun sharpness, usually 20-15 or better. Golf apparently plays better in high definition.

"Vision is the guiding sense to most human performance," says Alan Reichow, Nike's global director of research for vision. From extensive testing of pro athletes from all major sports, Dr. Reichow has determined that golfers and shooters are the best at seeing and processing things the rest of us don't.

On the greens, Tour pros tend to be especially adept at perceiving such small details as individual blades of grass and at detecting low contrasts, such as the difference in the shadows cast by the sun on turf that slopes at subtly different angles. They also excel at depth perception.

These skills help in determining how a putt will break -- a notion confirmed by Stan Utley, formerly one of the Tour's best putters and now arguably the game's hottest putting instructor. He didn't hesitate to attribute part of his success as a putter to the fact that he always read 20-10 on the eye charts, meaning he could see clearly at 20 feet what people with 20-20 vision see clearly only at 10 feet. (Joe DiMaggio similarly credited much of his prowess in baseball to 20-10 vision.)

"The consequences of good vision are greater the closer you get to the hole," Mr. Utley says, mostly because there is more to notice there that will have a realistic effect on actually making the putt. He cited Ben Crenshaw, another notably expert putter, as an example. On long putts, Mr. Utley observed from playing with him, Mr. Crenshaw didn't seem to work especially hard reading the line between the ball and the hole, apart from getting a general sense of the break, but on shorter putts he carefully inspected the turf and studied every angle.

At Nike, Dr. Reichow contributed several ideas to the design of a new putter, called the IC, that addresses another challenge: visual noise. More than a million nerve fibers connect each eye to the brain. That's a fire hose of information. Much of it is useful in making a putt -- including, surprisingly, the input from your peripheral vision, which helps locate you in space and clues you in to the overall context of the green and its slopes. But some of it, such as the nonessential angles of the putter head and shaft, is confusing and even misleading.

So the new Nike putter (including the shaft and grip) is green, to blend into the surrounding grass, except for the blazing white leading edge of the blade and the tee-shaped alignment line.

Finding ways to improve focus and other visual skills is a growing subdivision of golf instruction. The most famous anecdote in this regard occurred at the 2005 U.S. Open, when eventual winner Michael Campbell frequently stopped at portable toilets to perform eye exercises. For about two minutes at each stop, with his head still, he kept his eyes focused on a golf pencil that he moved in horizontal figure-eights about a foot away. The point was to improve his eyes' ability to converge properly, which was supposed to help him see his putting line more clearly.

The Stare-Down: Tiger Woods (top) and Zach Johnson (middle) have had Lasik surgery; Jack Nicklaus complained often about his declining eyesight.

I ran this by Mark Whitten, the Rockville, Md., ophthalmologist who performed Lasik surgery on Messrs. Woods, Johnson and Funk and 30 other PGA Tour pros. He said he hadn't seen reports of any controlled studies that either proved or disproved the validity of visual-training regimens. But he did playfully suggest that whatever else those visits accomplished, spending a few calm minutes in the john wasn't a bad strategy in a high-stress situation like the U.S. Open.

Dr. Whitten is also skeptical of claims by some companies that their sunglasses can improve a player's ability to read a green. He says that sunglasses can relieve the distraction of sun glare, but in doing so, reduce the flow of visual information to the brain.

One of the leading practitioners of visual training for golf and other sports is Craig Farnsworth, an optometrist based near Palm Springs, Calif. "You have to distinguish between mere eyesight, which is very important in golf, no doubt about it, and the kind of vision which adds meaning to what you see," says Dr. Farnsworth.

Some of the work he does with golfers is off-course, such as having them compare and match special cards with shapes that have extremely slight differences. On the course, he trains them to notice things about greens starting from far away, and to make minute distinctions about slope and grain when on the putting surface.

Perhaps the thorniest visual problem in putting is the discrepancy between how the eyes see the line between the ball and the hole when standing behind the ball vs. how the eyes (sometimes just the one eye closer to the hole) see the line when side-on, standing over the putt. The key, according to Don Tieg, director of the Institute for Sports Vision in Ridgefield, Conn., and the vision consultant to the New York Yankees, is to believe your behind-the-ball take.

"I personally try to imagine a furrow from the ball to the hole that follows the break as I see it standing face on, and then when I'm over the ball I try to relocate that furrow and putt the ball along it," he says.

But subtleties pile upon subtleties. You may see the line differently from one day to the next depending on how you're holding your head that day -- for instance, maybe you have a sore back that causes you to put more weight on one side. "Despite everything you do to see things correctly, some days you have it, some days you don't," says Mr. Utley. "That's just reality. That's why golf is such a hard game."

• Email me at golfjournal@wsj.com.

[dvc40jim]

Having my eyes fixed made all of the diff. in the world. No more worries about glasses or contacts and the issues associated with each.

Both my eyes are corrected better than 20/20 with my dominant eye a bit better than the other.... seems to make it much easier to shoot with both eyes open among other things.

I spend all day everyday working with Soldiers learning to shoot... in almost every case the biggest obstacle to overcome is eye related in one way or another. The more they work with the eye drills I give them the easier it becomes.

If it were the choice between a new gun or getting my eyes fixed, I would opt for the eyes.

[eerw]

Having strong eyes is important..to be able to see sharply, quickly can only be an asset..

[el pres]

DVC, what are some of these eye excercisees ?????

[nicfit212]

great article, nice that it mentions shooting even if it doesn't go into more shooting-specific detail.

[Stefano]

I truly believe that in our sport (such as in golf, tennis, and a few others ...) the performance is strictly connected to the power of our eyes (in other words, at what speed we can see ....).

First time I was face-to-face with Eric Grauffel, I was caught by his eyes: like two big "lasers-finders" always wide-opened

IMHO, his outstanding shooting is (in great part) related also to his outstanding vision ....