If your eyes feel cooked after training and you cannot settle down at night, the training itself may be part of the story. Dr. Dan Kelly, speaking at our 2026 conference, said plainly that visual work is work. Done well it makes an athlete more efficient. Done to excess it exhausts the visual system, leaves someone ramped up, and takes away the recovery that made the training worth doing.
Why would eye work cost an athlete anything at all?
Because the eyes are brain tissue, and brain tissue is expensive to run. Dr. Kelly describes the eyes as the external brain, the only part of the central nervous system you can see from outside the skull.
Glucose is the sugar your cells burn for fuel. His point was that the brain and eyes are small organs compared with the rest of the body, yet they take about 20 percent of the glucose coming in just to maintain function. Training the visual system is not a free add on at the end of a session. It draws on the same budget as everything else.
What happens when that fuel budget gets tight?
The body starts turning things down, and cognitive work is near the front of the line.
Picture the power grid on the hottest day of the summer. Essential service stays on. Everything optional gets dialed back. Dr. Kelly described the body making the same call: keep the vital functions running, keep the body moving, and slow the thinking. That is why reads, tracking and decision making often slip before an athlete notices anything in their legs.
the body is trying to figure out, okay, what can I turn down to maintain this function
What does an overdosed visual system look like?
According to Dr. Kelly, it looks like an athlete who is wired rather than one who is sore. The complaint is usually about winding down, not about the drill.
- Visual fatigue that lingers well after training
- Trouble settling at night because the system is still ramped up
- Recovery that is not keeping pace with the work being done
- Performance that flattens even though training volume has gone up
He was careful here, and so are we. Those signs have other causes too, and nothing on that list diagnoses anything by itself. His argument was simply that visual load belongs on the list of things being counted.
Why is dosing this hardest during the season?
Because the season already fills the budget. Games, travel, practice, lifting and rehab are all drawing from the same place, and visual training is one more input on an athlete who has limited room.
Dr. Kelly framed it the way the body works: it is always trying to find homeostasis, and it adapts to the demands imposed on it. The clinical problem is neither neglecting the visual system nor hammering it. It is finding the amount that produces adaptation without stealing from sleep. He did not hand out a prescription for that, and we are not going to invent one. What he said is that it is genuinely challenging to balance, and that the balance is the goal.
How do we think about this on our side?
Vision training is performed by specialists like Dr. Kelly. Our side is assessment, rehabilitative care and paying attention to total load.
- Find out what the athlete’s week actually contains, including the work other providers are giving them.
- Look at how they move and what that movement costs them when they are fatigued.
- Build rehab and corrective exercise that fits in the room that is left, rather than on top of everything.
- Refer out when the limiting factor sits with somebody else, which is often exactly what these conversations clarify.
Being in the room for conversations like this one is part of how we work at Active Sports Therapy. Knowing what a visual specialist is asking of an athlete changes what we should be asking of the same athlete that week.
Key points
- The brain and eyes take roughly 20 percent of incoming glucose just to maintain function.
- Under fatigue, the body tends to turn down cognitive work to protect essential function.
- Visual training is a real load, not a free add on.
- Dr. Kelly’s caution is that overdosing it can leave an athlete ramped up and under recovered.
- Managing visual work alongside everything else in a season is the difficult part.
Frequently asked questions
Can vision training actually interfere with sleep?
Dr. Kelly described athletes left ramped up and sleeping poorly after too much visual work. He raised it as a caution about dose, not as an argument against the training. Sleep problems have many causes, so it is worth looking at the whole picture rather than blaming one drill.
How much vision training is too much?
Dr. Kelly did not give a number, and neither will we. His position was that the right amount depends on what else the athlete is carrying that week, and that finding the balance inside a season is the hard part of the job.
Why do my eyes feel exhausted after practice?
The visual system is doing continuous work during sport, and it draws on the same fuel supply as the rest of the brain. Fatigue there is not unusual. If it is persistent, or if it comes with headaches or vision changes, that is a reason to be assessed rather than to push through.
Do you offer vision training?
No. That work belongs with specialists like Dr. Kelly. We handle assessment, rehabilitative care, corrective exercise and the conversation about how much total load an athlete is carrying.
If you are training hard in Hendersonville and your recovery is not keeping up with your work, book a new patient visit and we will go through what your week actually demands of you and where the rehab should fit. When the limiting piece belongs with another specialist, we will say so.
Active Sports Therapy · 123 Stadium Drive, Hendersonville, TN 37075 · 615-537-5520
Sources
- Raichle ME, Gusnard DA. Appraising the brain’s energy budget. PNAS. 2002;99(16):10237-10239. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.172399499
- Halson SL. Sleep in elite athletes and nutritional interventions to enhance sleep. Sports Med. 2014;44(Suppl 1):S13-S23. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-014-0147-0
- Appelbaum LG, Erickson G. Sports vision training: a review of the state-of-the-art in digital training techniques. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology. 2018;11(1):160-189. https://doi.org/10.1080/1750984X.2016.1266376
Transcript of the video
When I like to think of like fuel to the body for muscles and for brain how much glucose does the brain and eyes consume because eyes are part of the brain compared to the rest of the body. So it takes up about 20% of the glucose that goes in. So if you have a brain and eyes, it’s a small organ compared to the rest of the body. What’s the body going to bring it to do to help keep the body moving?
It’s just going to shut down cognitive function. So in a better way to look at Vision training its performance training. So the highest performers have better visual Stamos those are mussels and they acquired data more efficiently to you know, allow the body to do things with less energy. So you any athlete will benefit from any type of vision training vision and cognition and I hand coordination my issue with that is when you do it and it becomes detrimental to like recovery in your exhausting your visual system.
Then that’s a problem where it’s preventing you for your own. like Sleeping well because you’re ramped up. Yes. That’s what’s going on is like the body is trying to figure out okay.
What can I turn down to maintain? This function exercise and yes, it’s definitely all part of. Stamina, you know performance stamina exercise Stam.
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