There's an array of ways to improve your reflexes. Some of these ways to get faster reflexes are exercise intended to speed up your evaluation time, while others are simply every day activities that can make your recognition of stimuli faster. The best reflexive actions are those trained into "muscle memory".
Muscle memory is the act of repeatedly training a specific movement to a specific situation.The term "muscle memory" may be a bit deceiving because in addition to your training your muscles to react along a predetermined path, you're also training your brain to do the same thing. Think of something you do everyday and, while it may be awkward for a beginner, is now quick and streamlined for you. One example that comes to mind right now for me is typing. Awkward when i first learned, my fingers now flow easily across the keyboard. This happened because over the last 15 years, I've done a lot of typing.
While muscle memory may be an ideal answer to improve your reflexes to a specific situation, we're more interested in how to get faster reflexes overall. The best way to improve your reflexes is to do a variety of reflex exercises, mixing them up so that the body and mind does not become to habituated to the same routine.
Run through the woods
A great exercise to improve on all three parts at once is to try running through the woods or some other unfamiliar terrain. This is a great exercise because you have to constantly assess your surroundings at a rapid pace. The faster you run, the more difficult the exercise becomes.
Train with a reaction ball
A reaction ball is a six-sided ball which allows it to bounce and leap unpredictably in different directions. Throw the ball at a wall and try to catch or dodge it as it bounces back. As you get better, try increasing the velocity and / or moving closer to the wall.
Play video games
Playing video games helps the brain quickly shift between thought and action. While there are some video games that are specifically designed to exercise the brain, nearly any sort of fast paced video game will engage the mind on a variety of levels. This is what is necessary to improve reflexes.
Strengthen your peripheral vision
Improving your sight range can greatly improve your reflexes. Focus on a distant object and do not let your eyes break from it. Take in as much as you can see from the corners of your eyes. See how far left and right you can see before the end of your vision line. Practice a little each day, broadening your vision in this way. Another way is to have a partner start in front of you and walk slowly in a circle behind you, while you look straight ahead. Note when the person disappears from view.
Use a hypnosis technique
While this may sound a little hokey, there's a technique called Neuro-Linguistic Programming which allows you to hypnotize yourself into slowing down your perception of time. When a baseball player is having a good day, they describe the ball as appearing bigger or moving slower. It's not bigger or slower, but for them it looks that way. They've brought themselves into a trance, allowing them to speed up their internal world and effectively slow the outside world.
