Good hand-eye coordination is a useful talent for many areas of life and, depending on your job, it may be an essential part of your work. However, knowing how to improve your dexterity and hand-eye movements can often seem a tricky prospect.
If you’re looking to improve your coordination and hand-eye skills, read on for some tips.
Rule 101 – Get Your Eyes Checked
The premise behind hand-eye coordination is pretty simple – first, you at least need to have good eyesight – and, as a general rule, the better the input you have, the better the output you’ll achieve. As a starting point for improving these skills, you should first have your eyes thoroughly checked. If you can’t see well, you’re not going to have the greatest chance of attaining good coordination.
Test Your Peripheral Vision
It’s been proven women have a considerable advantage over men when it comes to peripheral vision, sometimes achieving up to 180’ without any problems. On the flip side, men have better targeted vision.
It’s thought that these skills largely evolved during the hunter-gatherer stage when men would typically require better long-range vision and stimulus from movement to target animals during hunting, whereas women developed better peripheral vision to distinguish close-at-hand objects, such as berries, etc.
However, regardless of your gender, improving your peripheral vision will only be of benefit when it comes to increasing your hand-eye coordination.
Practice Drills & Skills That Improve Both Eyesight & Coordination
There are numerous easy drills you can try that will build up your hand-eye coordination while also improving your eyesight and general dexterity, including:
Shooting
Shooting is the ideal sport for improving your long-range sight as well as putting your coordination skills to the test. It has also been proven to be beneficial for general health, reducing stress and helping to regulate breathing thereby lowering blood pressure. If you’re looking to get started in shooting, it’s possible to build your own gun with component parts (80% lowers can be found at 80percentarms.com) or you could check online for local gun clubs and/or ranges where you can test your skills before purchasing.
Try Playing Catch
Just the simple act of repetitive catch will have a dramatic effect on your hand-eye coordination. If you don’t have anyone willing to play with you, a great solitary exercise you could try is to one-hand-throw a tennis ball against a wall then catch it with your other hand. This is perhaps even better than a two-person game as the throw-catch movements are all performed by you in one go.
Learning To Juggle
Perhaps the ultimate practice for improving hand-eye coordination is juggling. When you juggle, your eyes are focused on the crossing point of the balls above you while your mind is having to make decisions where your hands should go, based on the position of these balls. There are few better ways to drill your brain into getting your eyes and hands working together than getting good at juggling. As your skills improve, try increasing the number of balls or upping the difficulty by getting someone to ask you tough math questions while you juggle.
