A new study revealed how professional hockey players trained with special glasses that allowed them to notice action intermittently demonstrated better practise drills

Earlier research using the stroboscopic eyewear during training showed improved vision, visual attention, and ability to anticipate the timing of moving items. But the small pilot study with Hurricanes players is the first to directly explore whether those effects can improve sports performance. The study appears online in the November-December issue of Athletic Training & Sports Health Care.
Players who trained with the strobe eyewear experienced an 18 percent performance improvement in a series of on-ice skill tests. A control group showed no change.
"From a sports perspective, you want to know if something is going to be an actual, viable training tool," said Stephen Mitroff, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology and neuroscience in the Duke Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. "If players train with it, will they likely get the benefits? Our previous work showed that stroboscopic training affected vision and attention, and here we explored if those changes can benefit sports performance."
The strobe eyewear forces the wearer's visual system to train in difficult conditions in much the same way that wearing ankle weights makes training harder for a runner, he said. The eyewear's lenses alternated at different rates, always with a clear state for a tenth of a second, and various opaque states ranging in intervals from 67 milliseconds to nine-tenths of a second.
Mitroff collaborated with Hurricanes athletic trainers and strength and condition coaches Peter Friesen and Doug Bennett to test players during the team's 16-day pre-season training camp. Eleven players completed the full study wearing eyewear called the Nike SPARQ Vapor Strobe.
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"That 18-percent improvement for on-ice skills for professional players is huge," Mitroff said. "This is a dramatic improvement observed in professional athletes."
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Although the most immediate application of the strobe eyewear is in athletics, Mitroff said the potential does exist for it to have future impact in medical, military, and physical rehabilitation settings.
Source-Eurekalert