Vision Examination Protocol for Archery Athletes Along With an Introduction to Sports Vision

Introduction:

Visual skills are one of the main pillars of intangible faculties of athletes that can influence their performance. Great number of vision tests used to assess the visual skills and it will be irrational to perform all vision tests for every sport.

Objectives:

The purpose of this protocol article is to present a relatively comprehensive battery of tests and assessments on static and dynamic aspects of sight which seems relevant to sports vision and introduce the most useful ones for archery.

Materials and Methods:

Through extensive review of the literature, visual skills and respective tests were listed; such as ‘visual acuity, ‘contrast sensitivity’, ‘stereo-acuity’, ‘ocular alignment’, and ‘eye dominance’. Athletes were defined as “elite” and “non-elite” category based on their past performance. Dominance was considered for eye and hand; binocular or monocular aiming was planned to be recorded. Illumination condition was defined as to simulate the real archery condition to the extent possible. The full cycle of examinations and their order for each athlete was sketched (and estimated to take 40 minutes). Protocol was piloted in an eye hospital. Female and male archers aged 18 - 38 years who practiced compound and recurve archery with a history of more than 6 months were included.

Conclusions:

We managed to select and design a customized examination protocol for archery (a sight-intensive and aiming type of sports), serving skill assessment and research purposes. Our definition for elite and non-elite athletes can help to define sports talent and devise skill development methods as we compare the performance of these two groups. In our pilot, we identified 8 “archery figures” (by hand dominance, eye dominance and binocularity) and highlighted the concept “congruence” (dominant hand and eye in the same side) in archery performance.