How too much time spent on screens and close media can impact the goalkeeper's process of accommodation, negatively impacting their athletic performance.
Take your pointer finger and hold it arm's length away from your nose.
Focus intently on it with both eyes. Now, slowly move your finger closer to your nose. As your finger gets closer and closer you'll notice your vision will double at one point, usually closest to your nose.
The process of your eyes focusing on an object, to maintain a clear in focus image, at any given point is known as the process of accommodation.
Throughout the game and in training the goalkeeper is required to visually process the field in front of him, the players' positions, the speed of play, predict where it's going, read shot trajectory, and so on and so on. All of these require one solid attribute...vision.
In terms of shot-stopping alone there's much a goalkeeper has to view and interpret the moment the ball is struck goal-ward.
Finding the ball is the first bit of information
Being able to identify the spin of the ball is the next task
After discerning the spin, anticipate trajectory
Physically move using shot-stopping technique while eyes are fixed on target
All of these have to happen within a second of the ball being struck otherwise you won't make the save.
What do screens have to do with all of this you may be wondering...
Well there's a growing concern that kids growing up in a world focused on screens will not develop the proper reflexes of accommodation and this will negatively impact athletic performance unless combatted with what's known as Neurovisual Training.
As people stare at their phones for longer periods of time they're actually straining their eyes into a near-sighted convergence point. The longer you look the more comfortable your eyes get fixed at that particular distance. For goalkeeping we need to be able to process information quickly from distance as well as close-range.
Imagine if you were to hold a half squat for 20 minutes, or 2 hours, immediately before a game? Do you think such an isometric contraction of your leg muscles might make them a bit stiffer or sluggish during the game? That is what you are doing when you are accommodating to a screen 14 inches from your face; a sustained isometric contraction that makes it very hard to focus or accommodate on things going on in the field.
Your fatigued eye muscles will be stiff and sluggish.
When looking at something up close the muscles that control the lens need to work to change the shape of the lens. This is work that impacts both the muscles and the lenses. People who spend a lot of time on their phones are needing to get eye-glass prescriptions to see far. They lose the ability to focus far.
You may be able to see far, for now, but if you are on the phone or up close media a lot of the ability to see clearly and respond to changing conditions on the field will slow down. First your speed of accommodation goes and that can be negatively impacted in the lead up to a game or practice.
What if you were a professional athlete and suddenly you started to lose your ability to accommodate quickly? What do you think would happen?
In a newsletter, and one of my favorite reads on this subject matter; Friends of Neurovisual Training, (Inneuractive.com/friends-of-nvt-newsletter Issue 5, Volume 3. By Jon Vincent) they talk about a professional baseball player whose batting performance dropped. The drop was associated with an increase in time on the phone and media.
One important reflex that may be mildly impaired in the short term would be the accommodative-convergence accommodation ratio (ACA) which is a reflex that allows for the adjustment of the accommodation system (eyes focusing ability when transitioning from a near object to a far object or vice versus).
He was fortunate in that he sought help and was able to turn his game around. This is a cautionary tale concerning the risks of forcing your eyes to accommodate up close on a phone too much.
In my personal experience, I did Neurovisual training for the last three years of my time at the University of Cincinnati on the Dynavision D2 board. Which is a fantastic device that helps with concussion rehabilitation but also can be used as a neurovisual training device (I highly recommend avoiding concussions and using this as a toy).
If your school or athletic performance institution has one of these devices you should get on it and test your skills. There are many protocols (training methods) to choose from and can be limitlessly created with the software they have.
If you don't have access to a device like the D2 there are many other ways to train your eyes and neurocognitive processes right in your very own home.
Saccadic Eye Charts are an effective tool that I utilized whenever I didn't have access to other devices. It's a great way to train your eyes to move side to side and process information. The way these work is you have 4 sheets of paper. All 4 sheets have 4x5 rows and columns of randomly generated numbers and letters. The pages are measured a few feet apart from one another, taped up in the fashion of the cardinal directions on the wall.
Generally you want to try and stand 10 feet away from the sheets when doing this training. (Fig. 1)
![](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/48bc72_1e6722672c93477bbd9e24317ee9cbeb~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_980,h_700,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/48bc72_1e6722672c93477bbd9e24317ee9cbeb~mv2.jpg)
The objective of the 'viewer' is to read aloud the top left letter/number on page A, transition the focus to page B and read the next letter/number over. After reading that letter/number, revert the eyes back to page A and keep reading the letters until time is up or the row has been read correctly. This way trains left-to-right eye movement (and vice a versa). If you were to read the pages on the N/S axis you would be training up/down eye movement.
This is a great exercise for soccer and goalkeepers in general because it is analogous to scanning the field, as well as training muscle memory so you can shift your gaze and get back to where you were looking by improving eye-muscle-memory.
How we can make this work well and help train our accommodation process further is to have the viewer move forwards and backwards a few steps continuously while reading the letters/numbers aloud. This causes the eyes to use converge and diverge light more often in order to focus on the letter/number.
There are other visual training tools that you can utilize within the confines of your very own home. I'll be discussing those in blog posts with their corresponding neurovisual benefits in the future.
So sacrifice the screen. Go outside and juggle a soccer ball, print a couple pieces of paper to test your neurovisual processes, read a book, anything to opt out of unnecessary screen time. The long term effects of too much screen exposure on the accommodation process are still being studied to this day.
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