So today, for the first time in quite a bit of time, I decided to play darts. Last time I played was maybe 2-4 months ago for a couple minutes, but today was on my own board with not as messed up darts in my own room. I noticed something. I was a lot better. So far, my best I can do is get the dart in number sectors I aimed it at 4/6 times, going 1,2,3,4,5,6 around the board.
http://www.higher-faster-sports.com/ver ... mpfaq.html
I was reading this, he's a coach who specializes basically in vertical jump/speed, for athletic ability. He said 3 basic things for having athleticism. First was be under 10% bodyfat. Second was have at least a 1.5-2x parallel squat, but the third, going with visual spatial, was an interesting test. He said you should be able to jump over a knee high cone/bench/whatever 20 times in 10 seconds.
So I decided to practice that very thing. The first time I tried it, I tried it with a knee high platform. It took probably 30-40 seconds. I realized I'd take forever to try to achieve something trying that. So what I did was get an aerobic stepper plate (about 3" high) and decided to try jumping over that. Doing that, my first day, I got to 14-15s my first day. Second day trying it, got to 11-12. My plan was just do it for speed, and increase height as speed improves. Still not at 10 seconds yet, though. I'll be quite happy at 10s for 3", but knee high for 10s is a lot to aim to, obviously. I've also been doing the same exercise on one leg, too, though not for time. That and jumping over 4 hurdles one after the other.
This is basically (in some effect) plyometric training. It was sort of formulated by a Soviet scientist. The point of them is basically increasing visual spatial ability. To a point, video games can improve hand/eye coordination, but since they don't involve the full body or much of the body, I don't think it does much. I've always sucked at most video games, too. The reason they were invented, though, was because visual spatial capacity allows you to use your body more efficiently. Someone can be quite physically strong, and have horrendous visual spatial skills, so they're a crap athlete. Plyometrics was made to correct this. It doesn't really build strength in the classic sense, but it does improve visual spatial ability.
I don't know the causation to correlation here, but like....I sure couldn't do what I did in darts before, or ever. Not even close. So look into plyometric exercises, simple things like running through ladders, or the jumping over a platform like described. The way I see it, gaining athletic ability is almost a "cure" for my NVLD, if that makes sense. It's apparently carrying over to completely unrelated things like darts. Before this, while driving today, I noticed I didn't get as "spooked" as easy, less anxiety, I'm wondering if my visual spatial capacity has improved somewhat. I don't know if it fixes social things/cues, no idea, but having increased visual spatial ability is like half the battle for me. If you have NVLD or just generally bad visual spatial skills, seriously look into these exercises, or any physical activity. It'll improve it by some extent. I just did today what I never ever thought I'd EVER be able to do.
HOWEVER, we'll have to see tomorrow. This all could be due to lack of sleep sort of turning off the verbal part of my brain a bit. It was weird with the darts, as the darts moved without me, uhm...talking through the moves, if that makes sense? Like I just threw them and my mind was blank. However, even on the ice today, I did a lot better than I normally do on extreme sleep deficits (I usually do terrible.) I wonder.
If the mods wanna move this to Health and Fitness, go ahead. I figured I'd put it here, as it's related to ASD. Anyone else wanna be a Guinea pig and see if jumping over things like this helps their visual spatial processing in any fashion?
01 Mar 2013, 12:53 am
