Sean Muller Sports Coaching provides specialist sessions targeted at an essential but neglected aspect of coaching and practice, Visual Cues Training (VCT) for sport. Traditional coaching focuses solely on technique but neglects training of the visual system. Visual Cues Training provides:

• focused coaching to train early pick-up of important visual information such as a bowler’s body language that can assist a cricket batsman to read the type of ball to be delivered
• challenging tasks for players to test their ability to read an opponents body language 
• a unique dimension to practice that is vital for player preparation

The importance of early pick-up of visual cues can be determined by considering the time a cricket batsman has to prepare and execute a stroke. For example, when a cricket batsman faces a bowler who delivers a ball between 120 - 140 km/h, the travel time of the ball from ball release to the position of the batsman on the crease is approximately 700 milliseconds. The batsman’s movements (i.e., backlift, foot placement and downswing) and visual processing of information equates to a total of approximately 900ms, which is longer than the travel time of the ball. Therefore, a batsman cannot simply wait till the ball is in its flight phase to decide which stroke to play otherwise he/she will be late in executing the stroke. It follows then, the earlier a player can pick-up visual cues the earlier decisions can be made providing more time to prepare and execute a batting stroke, catch a ball or cause a run-out. Early pick-up of visual cues is also important in several other sports such as tennis return of serve, baseball batting, badminton and squash, to name a few.

VCT sessions are designed based upon sports science research, hence, providing a scientific evidence based approach to sports coaching and practice. This ensures that players/clubs time and financial resources are invested to training factors that have been demonstrated to be critical to sport performance.