Byline: Lorilyn Rackl Daily Herald Health Writer
The U.S. athletes we're about to watch in Salt Lake City have spent years training for the Olympics.
Some of that training has come from an unlikely source: a suburban eye doctor.
Dr. Barry Seiller believes that if athletes really want to be on top of their game, they'd better not overlook their eyes.
The seasoned ophthalmologist isn't just talking about 20/20 vision.
Seiller says visual skills such as depth perception and focusing flexibility can be improved with the right exercises, just like lunges bulk up our quads and situps flatten our stomachs.
While 'stronger' eyes can't make you run faster or jump higher, they can help baseball players see the pitch clearer, quarterbacks spot receivers faster and lugers read the track better, Seiller says.
To that end, Seiller and his staff at the Visual Fitness Institute in Vernon Hills use everything from glitzy computer exercises to low-tech pieces of string to whip athletes' eyes into shape.
The notion that visual training can make a person 'see better' and therefore play better is controversial. Really controversial. Especially among ophthalmologists who fail to see any scientific proof that this works.
'To me, it's a lot of smoke and mirrors,' said Dr. Christopher Kardasis, an ophthalmologist at Advocate South Suburban Hospital in Hazel Crest. 'There is no science behind it.'
Science, schmience, say the athletes who chalk up at least part of their progress to visual training.
U.S. Luge team member Mark Grimmette credits Seiller with helping him snag a medal in the 1998 Olympics.
'We began training with Dr. Seiller in 1994, and in 1998 U.S. Luge won silver and bronze medals for the first time in history,' said Grimmette, who took the bronze along with team member Brian Martin. 'We are confident that visual fitness training has played a role in our success.'
Not just for the elite
You don't need to be an Olympian to benefit from sports vision training, says Kathy Puchalski, a registered nurse and visual performance specialist at Seiller's clinic.
Visual Fitness Institute's client roster includes everyone from weekend warriors and high school athletes to the pros.
'Most people don't realize that their athletic performance, whether it's golf, tennis, baseball - you name the sport - has the potential for improvement if they worked on their visual skills,' Puchalski said.
Take eye alignment, for example. If your alignment is off, you might have trouble pinpointing exactly where objects are in space.
This can compromise a basketball player's ability to judge the distance of the hoop, or a golfer's capacity to gauge the length and angle of shots.
To improve eye alignment and depth perception, Puchalski has clients work on their eyes' flexibility by setting them up with a 12-foot piece of string laced with three different colored beads.
A client holds one end of the string to his nose while she holds the other end. With the beads spaced a few feet apart, Puchalski tells him to shift his focus between various beads, teaching eye muscles to precisely hone in on targets with greater speed and accuracy.
Another exercise calls for hitting pegs on a board as they light up - think Whack-A-Mole at Chuck E. Cheese - while wobbling on a balance board to improve hand-eye coordination.
Other vision calisthenics take place on the computer, where athletes use a joystick or keyboard to replicate patterns that flash briefly on the screen or to spot camouflaged diamond shapes.
'It's like weight training for the eyes,' Seiller said.
Not all sports vision proponents subscribe to Seiller's methods.
Joan Vickers, editor of the International Journal of Sports Vision, says training athletes in an artificial setting doesn't help them on the field, court or track.
'You can't train them in an office,' said Vickers, a kinesiology professor at the University of Calgary. 'You've got to train them in the setting that they're faced with when they're playing.'
Vickers uses helmets outfitted with tiny cameras to track where professional athletes look when they play. She uses that data to train college basketball players how to shoot better free throws, for example.
'We're training their attention, their cognition, the way they're thinking about the skill,' Vickers said. 'And you get wonderful results when you do that.'
At Seiller's clinic, which eye exercises you do depends on how good your visual aptitude is to begin with and which skills are most important to your particular sport.
Tennis players might need to work on tracking, or following the ball with their eyes.
Quarterbacks, on the other hand, might focus on tasks to help their eyes look around quickly and efficiently.
An hour-long evaluation at Visual Fitness Institute costs $225.
Clients get a detailed workout regimen that might call for a couple 30-minute training sessions over the course of one to three months.
The whole program usually costs between $600 and $800, Seiller said.
Because it can be difficult for athletes to get to the Vernon Hills clinic for training, Seiller recently started selling a CD that lets people work out their eyes on their home computers.
It's called the Vizual Edge Visual Performance Trainer, and it sells for $299 on the company's Web site, www.vizualedge.com.
Seeing or believing?
Garrett Jones, a first baseman for the Atlanta Braves minor league team, plans on using the CD to work on his 'slight double vision' recently diagnosed during an evaluation at Visual Fitness Institute.
'The exercises kind of help my eyes work better together. My left eye moves a little slower than my right eye,' said the 20- year-old Tinley Park man.
Have the exercises helped?
'I've noticed a change in the batting cages, just being able to see the ball clearer and focusing better,' Jones said.
If Jones is having an easier time hitting the ball, it's not because he's doing eye exercises, say several ophthalmologists interviewed for this story. In other words, seeing really is believing.
'What we have here is a placebo effect. One big placebo pill and nothing more,' said Kardasis, an ophthalmology instructor at Rush- Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago.
Sports vision training isn't embraced by most ophthalmologists, who point out that glowing endorsements by satisfied customers are no substitute for scientific proof.
'I don't think that there's ever been a suitable study to show that visual enhancement exercises have either enhanced visual activity or have improved athletic performance,' said Dr. Eugene Helveston, a spokesman for the American Academy of Ophthalmology and professor emeritus at Indiana University School of Medicine.
Dr. William Rich III puts it another way:
'It's silly,' said the Virginia eye doctor, who spent 24 years as the team ophthalmologist for the Washington Redskins.
'There may be some people who have anecdotal improvements. But in reality, it really doesn't make physiologic sense,' Rich said.
The Redskins once enlisted the help of a visual trainer. After the team's visual skills were evaluated, one of the klutziest players boasted the highest score.
'And Joe Theismann, one of the most superbly coordinated athletes I've ever seen, scored somewhere in the middle of the pack,' Rich said. 'So it really had no correlation with function.'
After nearly two years, the Redskins bailed on the idea of visual training.
Seiller readily admits that the medical journals aren't exactly crammed with clinical studies showing that visual training translates into better sports performance.
'But show me the data that weight training helps you be a better baseball player or other type of athlete,' Seiller said. 'I think it's probably fairly scanty.'
While ophthalmologists often balk at the whole concept of sports vision training, optometrists - eye specialists who are not physicians - are more likely to accept it.
Steven Hitzeman, O.D., chairs the sports vision section for the American Optometric Association.
Hitzeman says too many variables, among other things, make it all but impossible to carry out well controlled studies gauging the effectiveness of sports vision training.
'When you're dealing with individuals who have different visual systems, it's very difficult to run a double-masked, randomized study,' he said. 'That's why there's very little evidence.'
That's not to say studies haven't been done.
One such experiment published last year in the Journal of Sports Sciences set out to determine whether visual training programs did any good for athletes in racquet sports.
Australian researchers, led by Bruce Abernethy of the School of Human Movement Studies at University of Queensland, 'found no evidence that the visual training programs led to improvements in either vision or motor performance above and beyond those resulting simply from test familiarity.'
Barrington native Frank Favia doesn't care that visual training isn't backed up by hard science.
'All I can judge it on is results,' said Favia, a member of Northwestern University's baseball team. 'I saw results, so I stuck with it.'
Last summer, Seiller performed corrective eye surgery on Favia so he could trade in his contacts for better-than-normal 20/10 vision. Around the same time, Favia started the vision exercises.
'Originally, I was skeptical, he said. 'But I was a .250 hitter in a wooden bat summer league, and after the surgery and training I was hitting over .400.'
Seiller knows that some doctors would write off Favia's improved batting as 'a psychological thing.'
'But when it comes to the sports aspect of it, I don't look at that as being an important way of differentiating things,' he said.
Added Puchalski: 'And the athletes will tell you they don't care how they got better. They just got better.'
