Macular Pigment Benefits for Sports Performance

Visual performance is essential to many sports, but there is a direct connection between vision and temporal processing. Building thick macular pigment has many benefits that enhance visual as well as temporal processing performance.

Thicker or more “dense” macular pigment is like having “internal sunglasses” that not only protect your vision, but also:

• Improve reaction time – as much as 15% (75-100 milliseconds faster)
• Reduce glare – hats and black under the eyes helps, but those are external…this is internal
• Improve contrast sensitivity – see a white baseball against a blue sky easier
• Improve photo recovery – for example, a camera flash or bright sun, and the time it takes to see “normally” again
• Improve seeing distance through haze

Click here to learn more about Internal Sunglasses

It is reported that baseball legend, Ted Williams, could read the label on a spinning 78 rpm record. For those of you too young to remember a 78 record, trust us when we say that it spins extremely fast – 78 full rotations in one minute!

So, if Ted Williams could really do that, imagine how well he could see a ball at the plate. Consider the following example:

A pitch thrown at approximately 80 mph reaches the batter in about 1/2 second. Increasing macular pigment from the lower range to a high range can improve temporal processing speed by about 3 Hz, or 3 cycles per second. This translates to the player being able to see the ball .075 to .1 seconds sooner.

Other sports that can be greatly affected through increased macular pigment and its resulting benefits include:

Tennis

Hockey

Golf

Lacrosse

Skiing and Snowboarding