Dr Daniel Laby is talking to John Portch and Joe Lemire about his vision training with Liverpool and England star Trent Alexander-Arnold in 2021.

He says: “If the question is: ‘are you worse than you should be for your sport?’ And knowing what each sport needs, if you have that information you can say how someone needs to train.”

Red Bull commissioned the project having been impressed by Dr Laby’s consultancy work in the NFL and his burgeoning collection of World Series rings having worked for three decades in MLB.

“So if Trent did well, which he did in certain areas [I would say], ‘Trent, you did great. We don’t have to give you glasses’ but if [instead I said] ‘Trent, your ability to monitor multiple targets at the same time isn’t what it needs to be compared to what it should be for someone on average of your level, we have to train that’; and that’s what we did with Trent.”

Dr Laby tells The People Behind the Tech podcast that the first goal is to help athletes to correct to the required level for their sport, which will differ depending on the discipline.

This was just one aspect touched upon during the conversation. Others include:

• The potential drawbacks of refractive surgery for athletes in some sports [8:00];
• His work with Manny Ramírez and the 2004 Boston Red Sox [16:00];
• Balancing research and practice in his work [22:00];
• The potential for using virtual and augmented reality in vision testing [36:00].

Joe Lemire LinkedIn | X

John Portch LinkedIn | X

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