José Tomás, a clinical optometrist and trainer, has taken sports visual training beyond the competitive realm, integrating his experience in Visual Therapy with the knowledge of physical trainers and elite coaches. In this interview, he shares his professional journey, the relationship between vision and body in sports performance, and encourages optometrists to explore this discipline through practice, rigorous training, and an open mind. A conversation that invites a rethinking of the role of optometry in today's sports.
What led you to explore sports visual training beyond the traditional sports realm?
When I started to delve into the world of sports visual training, I had already been practicing visual therapy for many years as a fundamental part of my professional activity. I was particularly interested in improving the performance of my patients at any age.
Sometimes an athlete, whether amateur or professional, would come to the optometry office, and after the evaluation, I realized that they could also have various visual impairments that affected their performance as athletes.
So, in that situation, I wanted to explore how I could improve performance in athletes and how I could help them by integrating visual training into their regular training. I had direct access to a way of understanding sports training from a much more visual and cognitive perspective, coming from great physical trainers based on neuroscience like Professor Salvatore Buzelli, Paul Dorochenko, and optometrist Andrea Cagno; their studies, professional practice, and perspective opened up the conception I had about visual training, especially applied to sports.
How do you think understanding sports vision training can benefit other vision and optometry professionals?
I have never asked myself how it can benefit us as professionals. What is truly important is how we can improve an athlete's performance, how we can help them overcome difficulties and barriers in managing visual information and motor response so that they can enhance their performance in competition.
If we, as professionals, can improve the performance of an athlete, or by extension, of a patient who requires our professional services; the consequence will be to expand our ability to care for and treat our patients as optometrists.
The understanding of sports visual training techniques involves having a broader perspective as optometrists, acquiring new tools that allow us to relate visual information and response. And this represents an important qualitative leap when it comes to evaluating and treating all our patients.
What advice would you give to optometrists who are interested in sports vision training?
In reality, there would be several pieces of advice.
First of all, we must consider that sports visual training and, by extension, sports optometry are still very unknown in the sports fields and in society in general. Anyone who starts working in this area will have to carry out an important task of information and promotion in their environment to raise awareness of this new service.
Secondly, of course, the training.
It is very important to train with optometry professionals who have proven experience and expertise in sports vision training.
Sports optometry is an area of our profession that is essentially practical. In reality, the fundamentals are the same as those that any optometrist working in vision therapy may know; but the practice differs significantly.
In sports visual training, the fundamental aspect is to learn how, rather than what. And this is learned from a professional who evaluates and treats athletes, whether they are professionals or amateurs, in their clinical practice.
Thirdly, but no less importantly, it is about opening our minds and our professional perspective.
Search for information; follow and learn from sports professionals; mainly coaches and physical trainers. Understand how they train, what limitations and mistakes athletes commonly make.
If we want to work in a sport, we first need to seek information, ask questions, and understand the "physics" and technique of it.
I’ll give you a personal example; when I started collaborating with golf coaches, and more specifically with the Excellence Center of the National Golf Center in Madrid, I didn’t know anything about this sport. I had to learn for months with a teacher, go out to the practice range, play, and make many mistakes. Only then could I put myself in the “shoes” of a golfer and understand what they feel and what requirements a sport as complex as this has, both technically and biomechanically speaking.
"If we want to work in a sport, we first need to understand its physics, its technique... and put ourselves in the athlete's shoes."
How is developmental optometry related to sports vision training?
For me, it is a very close relationship.
On one hand, when evaluating and training an athlete, we must consider the relationship between their vision and their body. Visual information, along with vestibular and proprioceptive information, often triggers the motor response, the technical motor gesture.
On the other hand, although it is true that the athlete can also initiate a motor response, a technical gesture without visual input, when it comes to learning a new technical motor gesture, vision is the main "provider of the raw material" for learning during the technical training process.
Concepts such as motor gesture, technical gesture, tactical vision, and others related to sports practice align very well with the way of understanding the vision of developmental optometry, where the vision-body relationship forms an inseparable binomial.
