CYBO Extra Part 2

Peripheral Vision

Considering we’ve spent a bunch of time this past month discussing Rob Gray’s book How We Learn To Move, the recent episodes of Coach Your Brains Out have been conveniently timed. In Part 2 of their interview, they even included a couple questions from me. Awesome! I highly recommend listening to the full 2-part episode, but here’s: my 2nd question, Rob’s response, and my takeaways from his response.

(For my 1st question along with Rob’s response and my takeaways, check out the post from earlier this week.)

My Question

Instead of depth perception let’s talk about peripheral vision. There’s 2 scenarios I’ve seen that generate some controversy among coaches. 1 on the beach side, 1 on the indoor. So indoor side first: how about an indoor setter taking a look at the blocker’s setup before setting the ball? The majority of elite setters don’t take their eye off the ball but kind of feel the movement of the blockers in their peripheral vision. A non-trivial minority of setters do make at least an eye movement if not a slight head movement toward the blockers.

And then over on the beach side, how about a beach volleyball attacker looking at the defender before spiking. Most of them don’t outright take their eye off the set. They’ll see the defender in peripheral vision. But a non-trivial amount of attackers do take their eye off the set to look at the defender before they hit.

So it’s kind of a 2-part question. First, let’s assume that we don’t want to take eyes fully off the ball and we want to improve our peripheral vision. What are some of the best practices to [improve peripheral vision]?”

(Joe note: whew, that was a rambling question and I ask a second part about the pros and cons of taking eyes off the ball vs using peripheral vision… I’m cutting myself off and going right to Rob’s response.)

Rob’s Response

One of the things I talk about a lot in the book is that it’s surprising how much really skilled athletes use their peripheral vision. Everybody thinks that peripheral vision is blurry and not very clear. But there’s just a lot of things to see, right? So keeping your eyes locked on one thing and learning to pick up things in peripheral vision..

Whether or not that’s a better strategy? I think people can learn to use the shifting around (Joe note: taking your eye off the ball to take a look at blockers/defenders/etc). The big con is that while you’re moving your eyes from one place to the other, you’re essentially blind. Things are all blurry, you can’t really see. So you really have to use that strategy well.

But we do see it. Baseball players when they are running to catch a ball, they’ll look at the wall, then they’ll look back. You can learn how to do it effectively, but it is a real skill. So I don’t think either one is necessarily better or worse; I think the shifting around is a bit harder, but sometimes it’s necessary.

As far as improving peripheral vision, I think it’s just creating task constraints that require you to use it. Whether you have a task where you have to watch a ball coming in and there’s a person you have to pass to is going to be in different position or moves kind of at the last second. Or even secondary tasks where you have to perceive something: a color, a sound… I’d much rather it be a player that you’re going to [play] the ball to.

So creating tasks where you need to pick up stuff in the peripheral vision. It sounds obvious, but that’s the way we try to do it.

My Takeaways

This one is quite a bit simpler than Part 1. I admit I was surprised to hear Rob’s neutrality on the take your eye off the ball part of the question. I’ve never liked that strategy- in indoor or on the beach. Maybe that’s something I need to be more open to.

As noted, you do see elite players do it.

I’m more a fan of the develop the peripheral vision approach. In my Offensive Concepts seminar:

SmarterVolley Live: Offensive Concepts

… I incorporate a few of these drills. For example, we do a little Pass-Set-Hit work against some dummy blockers who are either Neutral, Pinching, or Fronting.

It was a good confirmation to hear that Rob isn’t a huge fan of secondary tasks. He touches on that briefly, but notes that he’d rather have players work to develop peripheral vision by seeing the movement of players and reacting to that. This also matches the idea of linking perception and action. This is something I’ve known but it resonated a little more strongly with me when listening to his response.

I’ve dabbled periodically in little drills like setting back and forth and seeing the number of fingers your partner is holding up. I always figured, “eh, I guess it’s just not specific enough.” It’s only recently that I’ve been seeing this perception - action link being the main driver.

For example, you can explain the concept of adjusting tempo based on an in-system or out-of-system pass to a player, and they can understand it. You can watch video, or even a live match, and many of them will be able to tell you pretty easy, “oh in-system, I’d want to be on second step,” etc. But that has very limited ability to actually linking the perception with the change in the timing of their approach.

So this peripheral vision stuff seems to operate the same way to me. The ability for a setter to have generic peripheral vision is probably relatively meaningless. The ability for a setter to develop peripheral vision and then link it to a concrete response (setting the appropriate hitter) is what really matters.

Are there any peripheral vision drills you like? Any other situations where it’s important? Let me know in the comments!