One of the oldest adages in tennis is “Keep Your Eye on the Ball,” and with good reason. No one is going to play the game very well if he doesn’t do that. In fact, TennisMD expert Bob Donatelli thinks the vision thing is so important that he has worked up a series of exercises to improve what he calls dynamic visual activity, which relates to the ability of eyes to stay focused on an object even while his head is in motion. See video by clicking below.
Your Best Tennis in 10 Weeks. Week 9, Dynamic Visual Acuity
“There have been many studies conducted on the effect of what some sports doctors call the final gaze on a target,” Donatelli explains. “Most professional athletes can maintain eye contact and see with extraordinary detail for five milliseconds longer than a average amateur athlete, and that can make a huge difference.”
The first exercise that Donatelli prescribes entails sitting on an exercise ball, with both feet on the ground and a golf club (yes, a golf club) in your hand. Put another ball, roughly the size of a tennis ball, on the ground before you, marking it beforehand with a letter you can easily see. “Address the ball as if you were going to hit it, and rotate your head back and forth until the letter on the smaller ball becomes blurry,” Donatelli says. “Do not actually swing the club, and see how long that takes, then see if you can last a little bit longer before the blurriness arrives by practicing the exercise. Then, try it with one leg just off the ground, and then the other.”
The idea, Donatelli explains, is to improve your ability to stay focused on the ball even while your head is in motion. And the hope is for tennis players to be able to make even more solid contact on the courts as a result.
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