As an athletic performance coach we train several qualities to prepare our athletes for the demands of their sport in an allotted amount of time. Whether it be absolute strength, rate of force development, tendon quality, grip, prehab components, or single joint strength. We try to implement so many things into one macrocycle or year of training for our athletes that we might miss the small things right in front of our eyes. See what I did there.

We’ve developed all kinds of programs that help athletes get stronger and faster with the hopes of becoming bulletproof.  When we enter the robust, unpredictable world of sport, we tend to fall short in keeping our athletes in the game, on the field, or on the track, and we keep doing the same things we’ve done in the past. We haven’t learned our lesson. More strength! More mobility! More power! More does not equal a more resilient athlete. It may be part of the performance puzzle, but major pieces are missing.

If we want change, we may have to look at what we are not doing. We train muscles. We train tendons. We train fast-twitch explosive capabilities. We do the best soft tissue therapies and the best conditioning, yet we still don’t always get the results we want. The change we want might be right in front of us, training neurological pathways and the vestibular system. Addressing these subsystems in sports performance is important because most of these pathways are under-stimulated with conventional training means. Complexity and novelty drive brain function. The more novel the stimulus, the more the brain pays attention to what you are doing—and you can’t go broke paying attention.

When I say neural, I’m talking about sensory avenues that the brain uses to feel, see, and predict where you are in space and how to navigate through it.  Most athletes will present with some type of sub-clinical vestibular or visual issue that—when addressed in a general way—will pay huge dividends in reflexive movement patterns. Improving the parts of the brain involved in spatial awareness, vision, balance, and coordination allows athletes to see more of what’s coming at them and increases awareness of their surroundings. This is paramount in sport not only for preventing head trauma but also for preventing accidents that may cause other injuries in general.

Use Fast-Paced Vision and Decision Making as Part of the Warmup

Given enough time, warming up before a training session can turn into a somewhat boring routine. The daily session can often benefit from a minor exercise modification, but skilled coaches can choose warmup exercises that accomplish even more.

Training isn’t just about the muscular and kinesthetic system.  It’s also about the visual and vestibular systems of the athlete.  More and more coaches are beginning to learn that there is much more to vision than just “seeing”, but rather, understanding that vision is linked to many more neural networks than simply the ability to look at things.

In “Light, Medicine of the Future”, Jacob Liberman tells us that light and vision plays a role in regulating the hypothalamus, the autonomic nervous system and the endocrine system. All vital systems that are ran autonomously by our brain. Integrating visual, and decision making based visual aspects into the warmup can also allow a coach to assess the quality of movement when athletes must visually react to a stimulus, and not just perform a “canned” movement that they can repeat and learn in a closed environment.

So what can we do in a warm up to train these systems?

There are 3 things that anyone can do in a warm up to enhance these qualities and get the most out of your 10-15 minute blood pump.

Hops– These can get the best bang for your buck for rotational competency and spatial awareness. By telling an athlete to not focus on the ground and look up/down while completing this exercise, the athlete gets a different perspective that forces them to maintain their position and figure out where they are in space.

Rolls– Rolling is a vestibular compromiser, it throws the body off. Training rolls in a warm up is a great way to help athletes figure out whats happening from the ground up. Your inner ear is the single most important sensory function that your brain and body need to function at a high level. If your vestibular system is compromised, it becomes a major threat to your movement world.

Pursuit and Eye Saccades– Something I learned from Dan Fichter (Wanna Get Fast) was rapid eye movement or eye saccades. Saccades are eye movements that quickly shift the eye’s focus between two fixed points. They are used any time that your gaze moves from one point of gaze fixation to another. Our brain uses saccadic eye movements to create a constantly updated, unconscious map of our body in relation to its environment. Visual stimuli from our eyes will produce neural activity in a part of our brain called the superior collicus, which is why this unconscious map is called the ‘collicular map’. This unconscious map allows us to reach for objects outside our field of vision, avoid obstacles and balance as we move. However, if our brain is injured, then this map will be wrong — causing us to become clumsy, bump into things, or get lost when reading.