Time waits for no one, and as we age we start to see our body fail us in various ways. Your hand-eye coordination is one of the key skills in daily life. As we age, our reflexes take a nosedive and simple tasks in our youth become increasingly difficult. But worry not as there are several simple steps you can take to increase your hand-eye coordination.
Two Key Factors to Improve Coordination
- Practice
- Time
Practice, Practice, and Practice. I can not stress how important practice and repetition is, to improve your hand-eye coordination. Hand-Eye coordination is a key skill in so many sports. Similarly, it will take time, results are not instant. But as you take time to practice, you will start to notice your body and reactions, starting to improve.
So What Can I Do To Improve Hand-Eye Coordination?
Playing Catch
If possible I would recommend something simple like playing catch. You can even build up your coordination by yourself, with a tennis ball against a wall. This works your eyes and mind, it shapes your whole body to instinctively react.
Learning to Juggle
One easy hack to improve your coordination as you get older is juggling, Yes, juggling. Juggling is a skill that again drives your brain to be proactive. As the ball leaves your hand, your brain is already deciding where your hand needs to go. Believe it or not, juggling is not a hard skill to learn…now I’m not suggesting you start by juggling flaming swords, but simple YouTube tutorials and three beanbags are all you need.
Train your Eyes
Train your eyes with simple exercises to strengthen your hand-eye coordination. Your eyes are everything, and sadly as we age, our eyesight starts to deteriorate. Contrary to popular belief simply eating carrots will not grant you 20/20 vision.
So what can you do? Try these two simple exercises to train your eyesight
- Near And Far eyesight drill
- Left and Right eyesight drill
Near and Far Eyesight Drill
The near and far is where you have two objects, like newspapers, books, playing cards. What you use isn’t important, you require something with enough to detail for your eyes to focus on. Place one object, 18 inches – 45 cm away from you and the other 10 feet – 3 Meters. Focus firstly on the closer object, taking in as many details as you can for 5 seconds. Next focus on the object further away, again studying and taking in as many details as can. Switch between the two objects for 3 minutes, trying to notice additional details as you do.
Left and Right Eyesight Drill
Very Similar to the above near and far drill. Here we are focusing on strengthening our peripheral vision. With two objects now at the same distance, they can be near or far, whatever you feel comfortable with. What’s important, is one is to your left and one is to your right. Focus on your object to your left, taking in details…then focus to the object on your right, taking in details. Do this for a few minutes, every day and soon you will train your eyes to focus on what’s around you.
Your Phone’s Apps
Whether your phone is an iPhone, Samsung, or any other Android phone. You have a wealth of Apps at your fingertips to help your hand-eye coordination. While memory apps can help to train your brain, they are unlikely to help in the scenario. What you really need to do is a simple search for “Reaction Time” in the App Store / Google Play Store, which will deliver you, countless aides to help. These Apps or Games will push you to achieve better results, and thus better hand-eye coordination.
Summary
As we grow our hand-eye coordination, unfortunately, starts to dwindle. However, this doesn’t need to be the end of the story. By following a few simple tricks, you can quickly improve. Personally, I love playing reaction time games on my phone. I love something that I enjoy doing, but is also improving my health.
If you have serious issues with your eyesight I would recommend speaking to your doctor and/or visiting this website, which I have found is an excellent resource, WebMD.