Ox String
Attention: Athletes, Tactical Athletes, and Coaches
The Ox String is the retractable, pocket-sized, patent pending vision training tool that can help you:
- Improve sighting and aiming speed and accuracy for shooting sports, ball sports, driving, and more!
- Stabilize dominance to 1 eye and eliminate visual confusion when both eyes are open.
- Dramatically increase the speed that you can observe, visually process, and accurately take action...especially on moving targets!
How's It Work?
In the basic version of the Ox String drill, shooters hold one end of the Ox String at their nose and either hold the other end with their other hand OR fully extend the Ox String and either attach it to something solid or have a training partner hold it.
Then, they focus on one of the beads.
In the image below, I'm focusing on the green bead.
If your eyes are both pointed at the green bead and your brain isn't suppressing (turning down the intensity of) the image from either eye, you'll see an "X" form at the green bead.
But many people don't see an X at the bead...and that's a problem.
If Our Brain Doesn't See The X At The Bead...
In the images below, I'm showing 6 different versions of what people might see if they're visually fixating on the BLUE bead.
The brain might also partially or completely suppress the image from one eye or the other and make sections of string fade or disappear completely!
Each of these impact performance in different ways...causing frustrating misses to the right & left, high and low.
And "getting the X" is only the beginning...
Once we get the X with one bead, then we start getting the X at different distances, increasing speed, and doing drills to increase our ability to shift focus quickly in any direction, track targets in all directions clearly, get the eyes working together better while moving, and more.
And the impact goes WAY beyond shooting better...
All of these, except the first one, cause the brain to burn excess oxygen and glucose when we try to aim, move, or read and it's like trying to go through life with the parking brake on...we'll probably get where we're going, it'll just take longer and performance will be a little sluggish.
Using the Ox String allows us to quickly identify these issues AND oftentimes dramatically improve performance in just a few minutes.
And I've used it to improve performance with pistol, rifle, and shotgun shooters (regardless of the sighting method), martial artists, and athletes involved in golf, basketball, football, baseball, volleyball, soccer, pickleball, cornhole, billiards, golf, driving, trail running, and any sport or hobby that involves movement.
Even for non-active people, these drills help reduce eye strain when doing screen work, can reduce headaches and neck pain, improve reading speed & enjoyment, help with stair/obstacle navigation and fall prevention...and much more.
This is possible because we've got 20+ areas of the brain that are responsible for visual processing and vision accounts for 70%-80% of our sensory input. When there are unresolved issues with vision, it can have a major impact on every area of our lives, whether we realize it or not.
And the quick & easy drills you can do with the Ox String are some of the highest leverage drills you can do to help with all of these things.
A Knotty Little Problem
With the "Brock" String
About a century ago, a Swiss-born optometrist, Dr. Fredrick Brock was struggling with eye alignment issues and did not want to entertain surgery as an option.
He realized, even back then, that when the eyes are not aligned correctly, the brain has to work harder than it should to process the images from the two eyes, to avoid threats, and to avoid tripping and falling more than necessary.
People make the mistake of thinking that the eyes have to be WAY out of alignment for it to matter, but a tiny deviation of even 1 degree (smaller than what most people can see in a mirror) can have a huge impact on everyday life AND performance.
So, he created a vision training tool called the Brock String that is basically a string with colored beads on it that allowed him to correct his own eye alignment issues, and then thousands of patients over the course of his career.
In the decades since, millions of people have been helped by the Brock String...including me.
I've used the Brock String with hundreds of tactical athletes, ball sport athletes, people with reading challenges, and people concerned about reducing their trip & fall risk with fast, dramatic results.
My good friend and creator of the US Navy SEAL Sniper Training Program, Chris Sajnog, had such good success with the Brock String that he called it "Front Sight String."
But the Brock String has always had a knotty problem.
It works best when it's permanently tied to something...and that's not good for shooting or other sports.
As soon as you try to put it in your pocket or a bag, the old-school Brock String has a magical ability to become a jumbled mess of knots. And then you have to waste 5-10 minutes de-tangling the string just to do a couple of minutes of drills.
I knew there had to be a better way...
So, over the last decade, I've used or created 50+ alternatives to the Brock String to solve this knotty problem...but the Ox String is the only one that's so different and so improved that it's worthy of a patent.
The most dramatic feature of the Ox String is that it's retractable and portable. It fits in a pocket or bag so that you can always have it near and it will never get tangled.
The beads are quite different than what has ever been used on a Brock String before...the diamond-like facets, the specific shades of colors used, and even how the silver interior and primary colored exterior subconsciously interact with the brain to automatically pull the eyes into alignment all make the Ox String dramatically more effective than an old-school Brock String.
The Brock String is great...and you can make your own by simply tying a few knots in a shoelace, but the Ox String will allow you to do much, much more.
Until now, the Ox String has only been available for people taking my live Vision Training for Firearms Instructors course ($700) or the See Quicker Shoot Quicker 2.0 training ($97), but today, you can get your own Ox String for only $27!
What Kind Of Drills Will I Get?
Great question.
It depends on which package you get. You've got a couple of options:
I'm Mike "Ox" Ochsner. I'm one of a handfull of neurology based firearms instructors in the world.
I wasn't always a neurology professional. It was kind of forced on me.
In my mid-late 30s, the consequences of 15+ concussions where I lost time caught up with me. None of my concussions were from heroic deeds. I've had more than my share of hard impacts with rocks, cement, trees, fists, and heads. And more than a lifetime of being next to people shooting .50 caliber rifles with muzzle brakes.
As a result, I had vertigo most nights for a few years, my eyes stopped tracking correctly, I had constant headaches, I went from being very athletic to falling often (and getting more concussions), reading wasn't fun anymore, my hand-eye coordination stopped working, and I had constant random pains on the left side of my body.
Life sucked and it was hard. I wasted a ton of energy "seeing," not falling, and not running into things.
I had to make a choice of whether this was my new "normal" or if I had another option.
Neurology, and specifically vision training, helped me get my life back...in less than an hour with a neurology trainer.
On a hunch, I started using some of the drills that helped me with shooters I was working with, and saw explosive results.
I was hooked.
I dove deep down the neurology rabbit hole...training with Next Level Neuro, Z-Health, Wharton Neurology, and more. Hundreds of hours of neurology continuing education...including more than 100 hours of live training this year alone!
Neurology and vision training changed my life. It took at least 10 years off the clock and allowed me to become a master level shooter with a subcompact.
In the process, I wrote a book on neurology based gun training that's been called the best firearms training book in existence and used by elite military, law enforcement, and civilian instructors and shooters. More recently, I was the co-author of the best selling book, Red Dot Mastery. My presentations at firearms instructor and neurology conferences have been called the best in 20 years, and I've had the opportunity to help thousands of shooters use neurology and vision training to unlock performance that they didn't think was possible for them.
And I'd like to do the same for you with this training.
A lot of what I do is hard to believe or understand because of how different it is than any other firearms training available. If you want to get a taste, I encourage you to watch my presentation to a room of 100+ shooters at the USCCA Expo.
It's rather "eye opening" In it, I walk the audience through some vision/shooting assessments as a group (you can follow along), we do some drills together that you can watch and do in real time, and then we measure the improvement together.
It's pretty dramatic.
Frequently Asked Questions
I've been told I don't have a dominant eye...can this help me?
People who THINK that they don't have a dominant eye are oftentimes the ones who the Ox String helps the most.
The fact is that the brain prefers one eye over the other for sighting and threat avoidance and it's the eye who's image gets processed fastest...not necessarily the clearest eye or the eye we'd like it to be. In some people, eye dominance is determined by one optic nerve being a single neuron shorter and the signal getting processed 15ms faster.
Eye dominance is contextual and can change based on which hand we're holding the gun in, whether we're holding the gun with one hand or two, whether it's a pistol or shoulder mounted weapon, and which direction we're looking/pointing.
To top it off, most eye dominance testing is only designed to show people whether they are right or left eye dominant. The brain is more complex than that and there are actually 4 types of dominance that we want to test for. The Ox String will help stabilize dominance to the right or left eye to make fast+accurate shooting much, much easier.
I already have a Brock String...will this help me?
YES! You'll find that the portable nature of the Ox String AND the greatly expanded drills will let you do things that few knew were possible with the old-school Brock String.
I have Monovision...can this help me?
Monovision is where one eye sees up close better and the other eye sees far away better. It can happen naturally, because of injury, because of contacts, or because of surgery.
Monovision promises the best of both worlds at a tremendous cost. In fact, monovision causes distortions in perception extreme enough that the FAA has a restriction on monovision for pilots.
If you have monovision contacts, I would reccomend taking them out to train on the Ox String.
If you have monovision because of an injury or surgery, then there will be benefits to getting the eyes to work together, but the close eye's perception of the string/bead will always be much clearer and crisper than the far eye's perception and you may want to work with the Ox String at further distances rather than up close.
How Do I Go Through Your Live Vision Training?
I run a live online Vision Training for Instructors class a few times a year. You get immediate access to the recordings of past classes, as well as the ability to re-take the class multiple times. For details, click the "Questions" link below.
How Do I Schedule You To Consult For Our Agency/Unit/Company and/or Speak At Our Conference?
Click the "Questions" link below and we'll get you taken care of.
Questions?
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