Summary sports vision conference. Milan March 2018.

Sports vision is a growing field all over the world due to the great possibilities it offers athletes to improve their sport performance through the improvement of their visual performance, a different approach to conventional training.

The vision moves in the first phase of the sports action, the perception phase. But it is also very important to receive feedback on how the athlete has made the motor performance and the new situation that has been caused, so it is the most effective method for learning in different sports. The visual system is the main source of information input about our environment (75-80%) and is also related to the rest of the senses in terms of prevalence, so having an effective and adaptable visual system even in the most difficult situations will be essential to have better sports performance.

But what do we think it is to see well? We understand that static visual acuity is an important but not sufficient measure to know the visual state of an athlete, we must measure all the visual skills that may be necessary for sports practice including an eye health examination, colour vision, visual field, motility, accommodation, binocular state, dynamic visual acuity, reaction time, central-peripheral attention, eye-hand coordination, anticipation time, visual memory, visualization ... etc. In each sport there will be some more important skills and therefore we do different visual exams and the level of demand will be different depending on the sport, including the position or specialty of each athlete.

The most interesting thing is to know that, like any sensory motor process, vision can be improved not only with aids such as glasses and contact lenses, but also with specific visual training for each athlete. Vision is a process that is learned and therefore can be taught.