The scientific emphasis that we suggest centers on Ability Development; the second concept that we highlighted earlier. Let's look at two examples of Ability Development.

For the purposes of the first example let's assume that in the process of Sport Election your child found that he had the particular physical traits and potential Abilities to be a premier baseball shortstop. Let's look at one of the many Abilities that he could work on to help support his on field baseball practice. To field fast moving sharply hit baseballs, and to hit them for that matter, a shortstop needs numerous Abilities. One of the most important Abilities is strong convergent vision. Convergent vision is the ability of the eye muscles to move the eyes toward a center focus point and to hold them there easily without strain. This Ability allows the player to "see" the ball longer and helps him to track the distance and trajectory of the ball accurately by triangulating it in space.

Convergent vision differs dramatically among people. However, it is a visual ability that is affected by training. In other words, any player without a serious visual handicap may be taught with a very simple repetitive procedure to develop strong convergent vision. The beauty of it is that, like all of the highly effective Ability Development procedures in this book, it does not require expensive laboratory equipment. In this particular case all you need is a ruler, a straw, and a toothpick. This actual Ability Development procedure will be covered later in the section which centers on visual enhancement procedures.

Our second example assumes your child elected to be a football running back. Among the wide variety of Abilities he would need is static anaerobic endurance strength of the quadriceps (thigh muscles). A running back is constantly moving and pumping his legs. He is operating under highly fatiguing conditions and has to maintain repeated sprint speed, often times with a few hundred pounds of opposing players trying to stop his forward motion. Anaerobic strength in the upper legs is critical to superior, consistent performance. Again, this Ability is highly influenced by proper training. As before, there is no need for expensive laboratory equipment; you need only a smooth flat wall. The actual procedure for this Ability Development will be located in section which deals with explosive movement velocity.

We would like to emphasize that all of Abilities discussed in this book directly relate to athletic performance. Improvements in these Abilities most often cause dramatic increases in performance. In the case of each Ability we have been able to offer you training techniques that can be carried out with easily obtained items you can normally find scattered throughout the house. In some instances this took a fair amount of ingenuity. Replacing hundreds of thousands of dollars of computer assisted precision built lab equipment with items from the cellar or kitchen junk drawer often required creativity, but the important part is that the procedures work.

As an example, our greatest challenge was provided by Response Time testing. Normally in perception research there is an apparatus used called a tachistoscope. Tachistoscopes are very precise scientific instruments that can provide a stimulus at whatever speed desired. In visual perception for instance it normally takes 170-180 milliseconds for a person to respond to a visual cue. Let's say, for example, when you saw a picture of a red apple you were to move your left hand and when you saw a picture of a black cat you were to move your right hand. Under normal conditions it would take about 170-180 milliseconds for you to respond after the picture was presented. A tachistoscope device can measure this as well as to precisely vary the time it presents the picture to you, etc. Using a tachistoscope, it is possible to learn to respond to stimuli in as little as 30 milliseconds. The difference that this provides in getting a jump on catching balls, reacting to other players efforts, hitting balls, and so on is almost undescribable . Practically speaking, it is the difference between being a star or an "also ran."

If you happened to have an extra $50,000.00 or more laying around to invest in a tachistoscope that would be great. But since most of us do not, we needed an alternative. Our first choice was a homemade version. Over the years I have been lucky to be visited by a wide variety of world class athletes in all different sports. Back in 1988, I had the pleasure of training with Marvis Frazier as he attempted to make his boxing comeback after his unsuccessful try at beating Mike Tyson for the Heavyweight Championship of the World. Marvis was a wonderful man with excellent training habits and a fantastic knowledge of boxing gained from his Dad, Joe Frazier. Marvis' main problem was that his response time was very, very slow. In boxing, slow response times are a deadly drawback as throwing a punch is the fastest athletic motion possible. The average boxer can throw a punch in as little as 60 milliseconds!

Since there were no tachistoscopes available for use in our training facility and since response time training was so critical for Marvis, I decided to build a homemade device. I enlisted the help of a tremendously talented young, electrical engineering genius and friend Silver Cho. Silver visited Radio Shack and with a twenty dollar bill purchased everything needed for what was probably the first ever homemade tachistoscope. The result was excellent. Of course, it lacked many of the features of the $50,000.00 model but it worked very well for our purposes. We could actually vary our presentation times in intervals as small as 5 milliseconds. And as a tool to measure and train response times it was great.

So my first thought for this book was for everyone to build a tachistoscope of their own. Unfortunately, the "recipe" for doing this required a little more expertise than a lot of parents have. We know in our own lives sometimes it is a challenge to simply plug in the toaster and get it to work. Forget setting the time on the VCR, let alone building a tachistoscope.

After lots of thinking and researching, the answer finally came. Ages ago, the astronomer Galileo observed one of the first principles of physics which was, that independent of the weights of objects they will fall at the same speed and rate of acceleration.

Using falling yardsticks, then, it would be possible to substitute inches (as measured on the yardsticks) for time (as measured on the tachistoscope) as a measurement output.

It worked! Response times were measurable and simple training procedures were able to greatly improve response results. Don't worry if you are a little lost in the theory; amateur physics is tough. The point is that in the section dealing with Response Time you will have very accurate testing and training procedures to help your child master this highly critical Ability. And for equipment, happily, you won't need much more than a couple of yardsticks.