2 Optical Exercises To Improve Your Baseball Skills
Baseball has often been referred to as the American pastime. If you enjoy playing baseball in your spare time, you are likely always looking for ways to improve your ability to hit a home run. Good eyesight plays an important role in helping you see and track a pitch, and maintaining your eyesight is essential if you want to become a better baseball player.
Here are two optical exercises that you can do at home to help you improve your baseball skills in the future.
1. Improving 3-D Depth Perception
In order to accurately gauge the distance and speed with which a baseball pitch is traveling, you must have finely-honed 3-D depth perception skills. Each eye sees images independently of the other. These images are transferred to the brain, which uses discrepancies in the two images to estimate how far away an object is.
If you want to improve your 3-D depth perception to become a more accurate hitter in the future, try using some optical exercises. A great exercise to engage in for 3-D depth perception is pointing a finger from each hand at the center of two identical photographs. Try to form the same image between the two photographs as quickly as possible.
This exercise forces your brain to quickly interpret the two differing images and meld them together to form a single image. By conditioning your brain to interpret three-dimensional information quickly, you can improve your ability to see and react to a pitch in the future.
2. Improving Eye-Speed Concentration
The average speed of a fastball thrown at the college level is between 80 and 95 miles per hour. Locating a ball traveling this quickly can be difficult, and getting your eyes to focus in on the ball before it crosses the plate can be even more challenging.
By improving your eye-speed concentration, you will be able to reduce the amount of time it takes you to focus in on, and track, a pitch in the future. A great exercise to improve eye-speed concentration requires a board with the numbers 1 through 50 written out of order on the surface. Stand at arm's length from the board and have a friend call out random numbers. Point to the number called, and have your friend record the amount of time it takes your eyes to focus in on the number.
Repeating this exercise can help your eyes grow accustomed to quickly processing visual information and focusing in on a single object, which will help improve your batting in the future.
Vision exercises can be beneficial when you want to improve your baseball skills. Try engaging in optical exercises to improve your 3-D depth perception and eye-speed concentration in the future. For more information contact an optometrist in your area.
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