Oculomotor exercises in the warm-up: the binocular vision pyramid in racket and team sports, what 48 studies say

In brief. In the warm-up for a racket or team sport, you place the least costly oculomotor exercises: peripheral awareness, fixation, slow pursuit, slow vestibulo-ocular reflex. Vergence and fusion wait for an assessment and a dedicated session. Across 1,275 studies catalogued, these skills improve on their own tests; their effect in a match is almost never measured. Updated November 3, 2026.

Which oculomotor exercises to place in the warm-up, and in what order

Hello to you, the movement professional,

This article starts from a video. On a Ligue 1 match day, during the warm-up, Martial Godo, then a player for RC Strasbourg, was filmed on the pitch running through oculomotor exercises with only his fingers as targets: pursuits, saccades, vergences. We included it in our Instagram reel, and it circulated widely in the football world, then in sport in general.

What struck us was the surprise it caused. This work has existed for a long time elsewhere: in American baseball, optometrists have been working with professional clubs for decades, and in tennis, coaches offer visual warm-ups before matches. LabO RNP, for its part, has been training movement professionals for years in the sensory aspects of movement and in taking the sensorimotor loop into account; vision is a large part of it.

Since then, we have done what the video could not do: catalogue the research. Our map of the evidence in sports vision counts 1,275 studies, and nineteen detailed analyses have been drawn from it, one per skill or per sport. This page is the entry point. It defends a simple thesis: in sports where you pick up information while moving, gaze is a component of performance, and you can no longer prepare an athlete while ignoring it. It also defends its limit, with the same frankness: that an eye exercise done outside the game improves the game, almost nobody has yet measured.

The useful question for the padel, handball or football coach is therefore about order: which eye exercises to give in the warm-up, which to keep for later, and on what evidence. Our answer fits in one image, a six-layer pyramid crossed by a thread that never stops, the vestibulo-ocular reflex.

Sports oculomotor function: a component of performance you can no longer ignore

Sports oculomotor function refers to all the movements of the eyes and head by which an athlete places, holds, shifts and stabilizes the gaze to pick up the information their movement needs. It brings together fixation, pursuit, saccades, vergence and, as soon as the head moves, the vestibulo-ocular reflex. Six muscles per eye, driven by three pairs of cranial nerves (III, IV and VI), orient the fovea, the small central zone of the retina where the image is sharp.

Three facts lift it out of the category of curiosities. Gaze distinguishes the expert: across 42 studies and 388 effect sizes, experts pick up the cues of their sport better, with fewer, longer fixations (Mann et al., 2007). The expert's gaze does not do what the instruction asks of it: facing a fast ball, the cricket batter follows it at the start, launches a predictive saccade toward the place of the bounce, then follows it 100 to 200 milliseconds after the bounce (Land and McLeod, 2000); at the table, seven university table tennis players watch the ball only 40% of the time of its approach (Shinkai et al., 2025). And athletes' gaze is rarely checked: 36.4% of 107 professional footballers present at least one binocular vision difficulty (Jorge et al., 2022), and 70% of 95 Nepalese national football and cricket players had never had a complete eye examination (Sapkota et al., 2006).

The eyes also take part in postural control. The link between vision and posture is established: closing the eyes increases standing sway, and the distance at which you fixate modulates it. Preparing the gaze means preparing a sensory input that the entire movement uses.

The most serious objection, we may as well raise it ourselves: nothing yet proves that isolated eye exercises improve play. The systematic review by Rawstron et al. (2005), covering 43 publications on eye exercises, finds no clear evidence for sports performance. In baseball hitters, the head does a large share of tracking the ball, and the authors conclude that classic exercises with saccades or wide pursuits do not reflect hitting (Higuchi et al., 2018). The two findings hold together: gaze matters in performance, and the way to train it remains to be demonstrated.

Key figures on the athlete's vision

Each line stands alone and points to its source. The inventory counts come from our evidence map, excluding concussion studies.

The binocular vision pyramid, an order of load

The pyramid arranges gaze skills from the simplest to the most demanding. It says in what order you load the system, and in what order you secure it. It does not claim that a lower layer "unlocks" the one above it: no study has shown this, and the literature describes rather systems that share part of their mechanisms, such as pursuit and saccades, which have in common part of the target selection. We defend it as an order of load and safety, nothing more. For each layer, a definition, then what the research says about it.

Peripheral awareness: seeing without looking

Peripheral awareness is the ability to detect what appears outside the fixated point, to the sides, above or below, without moving the gaze. It is the least costly layer, and the team-sport player uses it to read the space. In central defenders in 3-versus-3, the gaze serves as a pivot or an anchor placed on the direct opponent while the periphery monitors the rest (Vater et al., 2019).

Across 44 studies analyzed for training peripheral vision, the expert stands out less by a wider field than by the use they make of it in action. Reactive light panels mainly improve the tests that resemble them: in 44 university footballers, speed on a light test has only a weak relation with agility against a real tester (Broodryk et al., 2025), and in young footballers, a visual stimuli program added nothing to usual training (Theofilou et al., 2022).

Fixation: holding the gaze, then the last fixation before the movement

Fixation is the active holding of the gaze still on a target, without drift. Neurons in the front part of the superior colliculus and so-called "omnipause" neurons of the brainstem maintain it by braking saccades, and all the other eye movements start from there. A fixation that fails is visible to the naked eye: the eye slips, comes back with a small jump, slips again.

Its most studied form in sport is the quiet eye, the last stable fixation before an aiming movement. It is also the layer whose training has the best record: out of 20 trials, 14 were measured on the sports task and 12 are positive. Across 9 intervention articles, the effect on performance reaches d = 0.84 (Lebeau et al., 2016), and trained elite golfers made 1.9 fewer putts per round in competition (Vine et al., 2011). The file on the quiet eye and precision movements brings together 75 studies and keeps a sizable reservation: over 30 putts, the quiet eye can change without success changing (Panchuk et al., 2014).

Pursuit: moving a stable gaze

The ocular pursuit is the slow movement that keeps the image of a moving target on the fovea. It relies on the cortical areas that analyze visual motion (MT and MST) and on the cerebellum, flocculus and vermis. When it fails, the eye catches up with the target through small jumps instead of gliding along with it.

This is the biggest blank on the map: 25 studies describe the athlete's pursuit, none trains it. And in the field, it rarely works alone. In baseball players watching pitches, the head accompanies the ball while the vestibulo-ocular reflex is partly braked (Fogt and Zimmerman, 2014). In two of the best cricket batters in the world, the head follows the ball and the gaze gets ahead of it (Mann et al., 2013).

Saccades: projecting the gaze

The ocular saccades are the rapid jumps that project the gaze from one point to another in a few tens of milliseconds. The frontal eye field and the superior colliculus take part in choosing the target, the reticular formation of the brainstem generates the command, at the level of the pons for horizontal saccades, of the midbrain for vertical ones.

In the hitter, the saccade serves to predict: the analysis of the hitter's predictive saccades brings together 57 studies. On the training side, 46 studies on the map first concern saccades, 6 are trials, and the only one measured on a sports task is not positive. In 51 athletes analyzed after four weeks, saccades practiced at home, with or without a device, do not clearly separate the two trained groups (Ganebnaya et al., 2025).

Vergence and far-near: adjusting the distance

The eye convergence turns the two eyes inward for a near target, while accommodation changes the curvature of the lens to keep the image sharp. The two work together in far-near alternations, which is what a padel ball asks for as it leaves the back of the court and ends up in the racket.

This is the layer where assessment weighs the most. Our analysis of the athlete's binocular vision, 33 studies, finds experts who do not always see depth better, and eight training trials, none of which measures the match. In one of them, in 24 female athletes, three binocular measures out of six improve in eight weeks (Zwierko et al., 2015). Two recent trials, in badminton and handball, improve reaction but leave the main binocular measures unchanged (Chiang et al., 2026; Bernárdez-Vilaboa et al., 2026).

Fusion: two images, one depth

Fusion is the operation that blends the two retinal images into one and draws depth from it. Cells of the primary visual cortex respond to both eyes at once and encode their slight offset, the disparity. The Brock string, a cord with colored beads, is used to read it and train it. Removing binocular vision has a cost: in basketball players, free-throw success drops by about 8% with one eye (Vera et al., 2020).

A safety rule governs this top of the pyramid: two-eye exercises open only after the green light. Before opening the vergence and fusion layers, the athlete has first seen an ophthalmologist: this is the eye doctor, and it is the doctor who first checks that nothing stands in the way of working these floors. Depending on the country, another vision professional then takes over for the binocular assessment: the orthoptist in France, the optometrist in Switzerland or the United States, for example. With more than one professional footballer in three carrying a binocular discrepancy, this green light is no formality.

Six layers, then, and a pyramid that makes you want to climb it floor by floor. Except that sport is never played with the head still.

The vestibulo-ocular reflex, the continuous thread of the pyramid

The vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) keeps the image stable on the retina when the head moves, by turning the eyes in the opposite direction. The semicircular canals of the inner ear pick up the rotation of the head, the vestibular nuclei of the brainstem relay, and the oculomotor nuclei command the counter-rotation, in about ten milliseconds. Our article on keeping the gaze stable when everything moves details the mechanism.

You could make it the last layer. We do the opposite: the VOR serves as the axis under every floor, and it comes in from day one, at slow speed. Each layer has its head-moving twin, placed right after it. Fixation is extended by a fixed target and a head turning in a "no", then in a "yes". Pursuit is extended by VOR cancellation: the head and the target move together, and the gaze stays hooked on the target. Saccades are extended by head saccades. Each eye skill has its head-moving double: you do the first, then right away the second.

Our detailed analyses reinforced this choice. VOR cancellation, which you might have thought exotic, is what hitters do when the head follows the ball, and what dancers succeed at better than controls: twelve dancers suspend their VOR better than twelve non-dancers (Maheu et al., 2019). During multiple-twist somersaults, high-level gymnasts even suspend gaze stabilization and couple their eyes to the movement of the body (von Laßberg et al., 2014); the gaze during a spin is the subject of 30 studies. The athlete's VOR is therefore not limited to stabilizing: it also knows how to fall silent at the right moment.

The order "eye layer, then head moving" finds laboratory support. In eleven adults, horizontal pursuits done just before an abrupt head rotation increase the initial gain of the horizontal VOR by about 11%, and horizontal saccades or VOR cancellation by about 13% in the four subjects tested, whereas vertical eye movements do not produce this effect (Das, Dell'Osso and Leigh, 1999). The effect concerns the fraction of a second that follows, and nothing indicates that it builds a lasting gain. We keep it as a rule of session order, without lending it more.

To measure this thread, a test circulates under the name dynamic visual acuity. The dynamic visual acuity test actually covers two measures, a moving target or a turning head, and only the second has documented reliability in athletes, between 150 and 200 degrees per second (Kaufman et al., 2014).

Context specificity: a layer learned at rest must eventually move

Work on the adaptation of the vestibular system brings an awkward fact for eye training as it is often practiced, seated facing a target. A VOR setting learned with the head upright or at low frequency transfers poorly with the head tilted or at high frequency (Herdman and Clendaniel). The vertical position of the eyes, the vergence angle and the orientation of the head relative to gravity themselves serve as context cues. A hypothesis follows: a setting learned seated risks staying partly attached to the seated position.

The sports literature pushes in the same direction, by another path. Hadlow et al. (2018) propose classifying perceptual training by the resemblance of its stimulus and its response to those of the game: the more the two resemble each other, the more plausible the transfer. This is the logic of perception-action coupling.

The opposite excess exists too. Putting into a lunge or into locomotion a fixation that still fails at rest means training the compensation: the player turns the head slightly, squints, stiffens the neck, and the exercise reinforces the workaround rather than the layer.

The rule that holds both ends: each layer enters still and gains one floor of movement per block. A new skill is learned with the head fixed and the body stable. Once held, it climbs step by step toward locomotion and the task of the sport; the order of these steps and the moment to change them are decided with the athlete. The most recent one stays at rest, the oldest one moves, so that the new load and the context load never land on the same skill at the same time. In session, we often see it: on a new layer, the shoulders rise and the breathing locks, whereas an old layer is done while chatting.

This rule has never been tested as such, neither by us nor in the literature. It follows from the context specificity established for the VOR, and from a progression by stages. It is a reasoned field reading, and it was built in the field.

In the field, well before the video

What the Ligue 1 video showed to the general public, we have been putting in place for a long time, and more particularly Romain Katchavenda, co-founder of LabO RNP. Since the mid-2010s, he has been integrating oculomotor sequences into the preparation of athletes who live off picking up information: at the academy of a Ligue 1 football club, with professional handball groups in ProLigue, in rugby, in professional football in Luxembourg up to the European Cup qualifying rounds, in tennis, and in other sports where you read a trajectory before responding to it.

At the beginning, making a player's eyes work before training was seen as a whim, and the person suggesting it as an eccentric. Ten years later, a Ligue 1 player does it on the pitch on match day, and the video goes around the football world.

The content of these sequences, their dosage and the way to make them evolve remain the heart of our work with athletes and staffs: we do not publish them. This page gives the logic, the order of the layers, the thread of the VOR, the progression into movement, and what research says about it. One rule is shared without reservation: vergence and fusion stay out of the warm-up and of the time between sets, and come in only after the green light from the ophthalmologist. These are the most costly layers, and they quickly tire players who tend to neutralize one eye. To understand the logic that arranges these layers, start with the Introduction to RNP, our free course: RNP is presented there as taking into account the sensorimotor loop and the sensory inputs in movement, vision included.

Visual warm-up: what the trials really tested

On the warm-up itself, the literature remains thin, and this is the first hole the map reveals. Tuncel et al. (2026) had forty-two basketball players aged 14 to 17 go through a single session in three stations that mixed visual tracking, near-far alternation, gaze stabilization and basketball movements: jump, sprint, pass and shot improve right afterward and again thirty minutes later. Without a control group, these gains cannot be separated from the effect of an ordinary warm-up or from the repetition of the tests. In tennis, a trial registered in 2024 at Ege University, in Turkey, planned to compare in thirty players aged 12 to 18 the accuracy of forehands and backhands with and without oculomotor exercises in the warm-up; its status is unknown and no result has been published to date.

Stroboscopic glasses, for their part, have been tested in the warm-up, and they divide opinion. In 28 international-level table tennis players, ten minutes of warm-up with the glasses added nothing to sport-specific reaction speed (Strainchamps et al., 2023). In 22 footballers, the ball phase of the warm-up done with the glasses improves reactive agility with dribbling, and nothing without the ball (Zwierko et al., 2024). Our file on stroboscopic glasses draws from it a rule that holds beyond the tool: when an acute effect exists, it stays narrow and attached to the movement.

From test to field: what transfers, what stays with the task

Across the whole map, out of 229 training trials, 96 measure a real sports task and only 14 a match or competition criterion. Of the 96, 64 report an improvement, but 27 of these 64 are not randomized and the samples are small. Meta-analyses quantify the shrinkage: on anticipation and decision in team sports, the effect falls from 1.51 in the laboratory to 0.65 in real play (Zhu et al., 2024). The effect exists, and it melts away as you get closer to the game.

A measurement trap inflates the gains. When the test resembles the exercise, the effect on visual attention reaches 1.65, versus 0.07 when it does not resemble it (Guo et al., 2025). Wood and Abernethy had seen it as early as 1997: general visual programs did no better than a reading placebo, beyond familiarity with the tests (Wood and Abernethy, 1997; Abernethy and Wood, 2001).

The rare training programs whose effect was found in the field kept the sport's movement inside the exercise. In 80 high school baseball players, adaptive hitting in a virtual environment improves hitting on the field and league statistics (Gray, 2017). The quiet eye trained in putting holds up in competition (Vine et al., 2011). Conversely, in 62 young footballers from an academy, multiple object tracking in 3D improves on the task, without changing anything in small-sided games (Romeas et al., 2025). In an opinion article, Fransen (2024) concludes that to date there is no evidence of a far transfer of general perceptual or cognitive training to sports performance.

The systematic review by Buscemi et al. (2024) concludes more optimistically that benefits are possible, across twenty-five publications so disparate that no meta-analysis was attempted, and without a standardized performance test.

Links between the studies

Zwierko 2015 and Romeas 2025 converge: you improve on what you train, and neither shows a gain in the game, the first for lack of having measured it, the second by measuring it. Guo 2025 gives the common key to reading: a gain measured on a test that resembles the exercise counts for less than it appears.

Racket, team, goalkeeper, referee, rotations: what each sport adds

In table tennis, the expert gaze picks up the ball early, lets go of it and relies heavily on the head; gains at the table come from small trials, mostly in beginners. In tennis, the expert returner reads the server's body before impact, and in recreational players video training with instructions improved anticipation in the laboratory as well as on the court, against a placebo (Williams et al., 2002). In badminton, the expert's advantage is clear, and none of the 13 trials measured the match. In ten high-level badminton players, stroboscopy improved smash defense (Hülsdünker et al., 2019); in young elite players, the same team saw reaction improve with no difference between groups on the field test (Hülsdünker et al., 2021).

In team sports, football has scanning: in 27 players of a Premier League club followed over 9,574 possessions, scanning more goes with a pass more often completed, a role the authors judge small but positive (Jordet et al., 2020). In the Champions League, 18 award-winning players do not scan more than 18 teammates who were not awarded (Caso et al., 2025). In basketball, professional players predict the success of a free throw earlier and more accurately than coaches and journalists (Aglioti et al., 2008). In handball, six weeks of motor-cognitive training in 40 players improves a sport-specific defense test (Jedziniak et al., 2026), the only randomized trial of the ten studies conducted in handball to measure such a test.

The goalkeeper looks differently as soon as they have to dive: in front of a video, their gaze does not pick up the same information as when facing the shooter (Dicks et al., 2010). The referee errs in a way that points toward perception: at the 2002 World Cup, 26.2% of 337 offside situations analyzed were wrongly judged (Helsen et al., 2006). In rotations, finally, teaching spotting to novice dancers did not improve their pirouettes (Klostermann et al., 2022). Each sport has its detailed analysis, listed in the map that follows.

Map of the silo: nineteen analyses, one question each

Each page starts from a field question, brings together the studies that answer it, and says what they establish. The number of studies is the one each analysis draws on.

Established, debated, extrapolated: sorting the file

When athletes say they "see the ball" better after the warm-up, we are holding a field observation, a feeling for as long as it has not been measured in the movement.

What remains to be researched, and the study that would settle it

A map of 1,275 studies also shows its blanks. Each of the questions below comes from one of our nineteen analyses, and each has a possible answer: a study that nobody has yet carried out. If you are a researcher, a coach or a master's student, this is where the field is waiting for you.

What nobody can yet promise you

Nobody can promise you that a visual warm-up will win a point. Nor can we claim that fixation prepares pursuit, or pursuit prepares saccades: an athlete can have clean saccades and an unstable fixation, and it is the assessment that says where to start, the pyramid only sorts.

The architecture, on the other hand, can be tested. If, at equal volume over twelve weeks, a group that always does the same layers at rest obtains the same dynamic visual acuity, measured with the head moving, and the same fixation and pursuit scores, tested in a lunge and on one foot, as a group that climbs one floor of movement per block, the offset rule serves no purpose and we will withdraw it.

Until then, measurement remains the safeguard: a test, the warm-up, a retest in the athlete's movement.

Double vision, blur, dizziness: the ophthalmologist before any exercise

If your athlete reports double vision, a blur that persists, headaches during effort or dizziness, visual training waits. They see an ophthalmologist first, then an orthoptist in France, or an optometrist in Switzerland or the United States. LabO RNP works with optometrists, and its curriculum was built with them; the order of referral does not change for all that. LabO RNP is neither medical nor paramedical, and is added as a complement to a care pathway, never in its place.

The eyes, a gateway into the sensorimotor loop

Reread the whole map, one pattern returns. The training programs that carry over to the field keep together what the athlete sees and what they do: the bat facing the ball, the putt under the gaze, the handball defense under dual task. Those that stop at the task have separated the two, a screen on one side, the movement on the other.

The eyes are a gateway. What LabO RNP teaches is the entire sensorimotor loop: how what the athlete perceives organizes what they do. Vision holds a large place in it, next to the vestibular system and proprioception, and it is the complete loop that is at play in the field.

We train layers outside the game, and it is in the game that we verify.

👉 I want to understand why, not just what.

Eye exercises in the warm-up: your questions

Which eye exercises should you do before a tennis, padel or badminton match?

The least costly ones, at the bottom of the pyramid: peripheral awareness, fixation, slow pursuit and slow vestibulo-ocular reflex. Saccades and the top of the pyramid are worked separately, in a dedicated session, vergence and fusion only after the ophthalmologist's green light. The content is adjusted to the sport and to the player's assessment. No controlled trial has yet measured the effect of this type of warm-up on play.

What is sports oculomotor function?

All the movements of the eyes and head by which an athlete places, holds, shifts and stabilizes their gaze to pick up the information their movement needs: fixation, pursuit, saccades, vergence, and the vestibulo-ocular reflex when the head moves. Gaze distinguishes the expert from the novice in a meta-analysis of 42 studies (Mann et al., 2007).

What is the binocular vision pyramid?

A working order for gaze skills, from the least costly to the most costly: peripheral awareness, fixation, pursuit, saccades, vergence and accommodation, fusion, with the vestibulo-ocular reflex as a continuous thread. It is an order of load and safety, which does not prove that one layer unlocks the next.

Should you do the Brock string in the warm-up?

Neither between sets nor just before playing. Vergence and fusion are the most costly layers: they are worked in a dedicated session, after the ophthalmologist's green light. In 107 professional footballers, 36.4% presented at least one binocular vision difficulty (Jorge et al., 2022), hence the assessment before the exercise.

Do oculomotor exercises improve sports performance?

They improve the skills they train: in twenty-four female athletes, eight weeks improved three binocular measures out of six (Zwierko et al., 2015). Transfer to play is not demonstrated: out of 229 visual training trials catalogued, only 14 measure the match, and a review of 43 publications finds no clear evidence for sports performance (Rawstron et al., 2005).

Do stroboscopic glasses have a place in the warm-up?

The trials contradict each other. In 28 international table tennis players, ten minutes of warm-up with the glasses added nothing to sport-specific reaction (Strainchamps et al., 2023). In 22 footballers, only reactive agility with dribbling improved (Zwierko et al., 2024). When an acute effect exists, it stays narrow and attached to the movement.

When should you stop an eye exercise?

At the first dizziness, persistent blur, double vision or the slightest discomfort. You stop and refer first to the ophthalmologist, then, depending on the country, to the orthoptist or the optometrist. LabO RNP is neither medical nor paramedical, and is added as a complement to a care pathway, never in its place.

Why does a Ligue 1 footballer do eye exercises in the warm-up?

The intentions of his staff are not public; this type of warm-up aims to prepare the gaze before playing, by calling on pursuits, saccades and vergences. American baseball and tennis have practiced this work for a long time. The useful question for a trainer is about the order of the exercises and the place of the most costly ones, such as vergence, which we keep out of the warm-up.

Method. This pillar page rests on the LabO RNP inventory of 1,275 studies on athletes' vision, consolidated on November 3, 2026 from PubMed and our reading notes, and on the nineteen analyses drawn from it. The counts per layer and per type of trial come from this inventory, excluding the 84 studies devoted to concussion, and are identical to those of the evidence map. 48 studies are cited here. Each was verified against its PubMed record on November 3, 2026 (first author, year, title), its DOI taken from the record, and every figure attributed to it comes from its abstract. To these are added a reference textbook on the vestibular system and a registered trial that remained without published results. The order of the layers in the warm-up and the rule of progression into movement come from our field reading, presented as such: no trial has tested them. Updated November 3, 2026.

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By the LabO RNP team