Sports Vision Radio

The United States faces Belgium in the Round of 16 of the 2026 FIFA World Cup — a rematch twelve years in the making. Dr. Laby uses the match as a lens to explore the single visual behavior that most consistently separates elite performers from everyone else under pressure: the Quiet Eye. Penalty conversion rates drop in high-stakes tournaments not because players forget how to kick, but because p...

Walk into any Major League spring training facility and you'll find a technician holding up a Snellen eye chart — the same one from 1862 — and clearing players for the season based on static acuity. The problem: that number tells us almost nothing about whether a player can hit a 95 mph two-seam fastball. Dr. Laby draws on 30+ years of work with elite athletes, including eight World Series champio...

The 2026 FIFA World Cup is just days old and it has already delivered more visual drama than most tournaments produce in their entirety. Messi broke the all-time World Cup scoring record. Harry Kane converted a retaken penalty without flinching. A 40-year-old Cape Verdean goalkeeper named Vozinha became a global sensation. And every one of those moments is a sports vision story. Dr. Laby connects...

A new systematic review and meta-analysis in Frontiers of Psychology pooled nine randomized controlled trials and 323 athletes to answer a deceptively simple question: what does stroboscopic visual training actually train? The headline is unambiguous — strobe training significantly shortens reaction time (moderate-to-large effect) but produces no significant improvement in decision-making ability....

Three extraordinary defensive plays in the first two days of June 2026 — Julio Rodríguez's backspin-defying contested catch, AJ Ewing's full-layout diving snag, and Jorge Barrosa's committed dive on a sharply angled ball — looked like pure athleticism. They were. But they were also pure vision. This episode breaks down the neuroscience operating behind each play: smooth pursuit versus predictive s...

Which visual skills actually predict athletic performance? It's the question I've spent my career chasing, and Frontiers in Physiology just published the most comprehensive answer yet. Yang and colleagues pooled twenty-two studies and 1,113 team-sport athletes across basketball, soccer, baseball, volleyball, handball, even polo, and ranked nine visual skills by how strongly each one tracks with on...

There's a moment in every high-speed sport where the difference between elite and merely good comes down to where and when an athlete looks. A new study in the Journal of Vision gives us the most complete picture yet of what that looks like at the limit of human performance — and the Western Conference Finals are providing a live, full-court demonstration alongside it. Researchers at the Universit...

MLB's challenge system isn't just correcting calls — it's measuring human visual performance for the first time. 55%. That's the overturn rate on challenged ball-strike calls under MLB's new Automated Ball-Strike system. More than half the time a player or catcher challenges a call, the umpire got it wrong. Before piling on the umpires, consider what that number actually means. Every challenged pi...

You've probably seen them — the futuristic-looking sunglasses that flicker between clear and opaque while an NFL receiver runs routes or a college infielder fields ground balls. Stroboscopic training glasses have been floating around elite sport for years. For a long time, the science wasn't strong enough to say much beyond interesting idea, needs more research. That has changed. Over the past yea...

On April 23, 2026, Nature ran a cover image of a robotic arm mid-swing. The system behind it was Sony AI's Project Ace — the first known autonomous machine to consistently beat professional table tennis players under International Table Tennis Federation rules. Across a year of evaluations, Ace defeated multiple T.League professionals, returned more than 75% of high-spin shots, and scored twice as...

AI promises to compress months of work into minutes. Sometimes it delivers. Sometimes it delivers an answer that looks right — and isn't. This episode steps away from the usual sports vision topic to share a behind-the-scenes story: a week spent building, validating, and then dismantling an AI-driven model that appeared to predict Major League career longevity from vision testing data. The dataset...

We’re often told performance improves in a straight line. In reality, it doesn’t. At the highest levels, small changes in how athletes see and process information can create outsized gains. This episode explores that idea through Major League Baseball’s challenge system, which revealed a clear gap: batters get calls right about 45% of the time, while pitchers and catchers are closer to 60%. The di...

Athletes sometimes miss in situations where success should feel routine. The mechanics are sound. The preparation is complete. The movement itself looks no different than the ones that worked before. Yet the result changes. In these moments, the problem is often assumed to be technical. Coaches adjust mechanics. Athletes repeat drills. But careful observation shows that many performance breakdowns...

At the highest levels of sport, success is often determined in fractions of a second. A hitter facing an elite pitch has only a brief window to recognize the ball, interpret its movement, and decide whether to swing. That process begins with vision. In this episode, we examine a moment from opening night of the 2026 baseball season, when a lineup recorded five consecutive hits against one of the g...

At the highest levels of sport, performance is often decided in fractions of a second. A fastball reaches the plate in under half a second, leaving minimal time to recognize, process, and respond. Traditionally, player evaluation has focused on physical tools like strength, speed, and mechanics. These still matter. But long-term research in professional baseball points to another key factor: how e...

In sport, we’re often taught that improvement is steady and predictable. Work harder. Train more. Get better. But real performance tells a different story. At the highest levels, progress isn’t linear. It comes in sudden leaps. A small shift in how an athlete sees, processes, or anticipates information can unlock a disproportionate jump in performance. This pattern is known as a power law. A small...

At the highest level of sport, performance is measured in milliseconds. A 95-mph fastball reaches the plate in about 400 milliseconds. The brain uses a significant portion of that time just to recognize the pitch, leaving a very limited window to process and respond. In this episode, we go inside Major League Baseball spring training to examine the role of vision in elite performance. What looks l...

For many athletes, spring brings more than a new season, it brings seasonal allergies. And while they may seem like a minor annoyance, ocular allergies can significantly impact athletic performance. In fast-paced sports where milliseconds matter, clear vision is critical. A baseball batter, for example, has less than half a second to react to a 95-mph fastball. Even slight tearing, itching, or blu...

If you’ve ever watched a world-class athlete suddenly hit a wall, mechanics solid, conditioning strong, but performance drifting, you’ve likely seen visual fatigue in action. In this episode, we unpack the hidden factor behind unexplained slumps and why what (and how) an athlete sees may be the first domino to fall. Because here’s the truth: Every elite action starts with perception. And when perc...

What athletes call “the Zone” isn’t magic, it’s a scientifically measurable brain state known as flow. In this episode, we explore what’s really happening inside the brain during peak performance, why the visual system plays a critical role in accessing flow, and how elite athletes use specialised visual skills to perform with precision, confidence, and automaticity. Understanding and training thi...

Have you ever wondered how elite athletes perform seemingly impossible feats—hitting a 95-mph fastball, tracking a ball through chaos, or striking a target from extraordinary distances? We often assume it comes down to talent, strength, or instinct. But what if one of the biggest competitive advantages isn’t physical at all? What if it’s visual? In this episode, we explore a groundbreaking study o...

What if everything you’ve been told about carrots and eyesight is only half the story? In this episode, we unpack the fascinating science behind vision, nutrition, and genetics and why “eat your carrots” might be one of the most oversimplified pieces of health advice out there. You’ll learn how your body actually converts nutrients into usable vitamin A, why some people naturally struggle more tha...

How does a baseball player hit a 95-mph pitch… or a fencer land a strike within centimeters? It turns out elite performance isn’t just about “great vision.” It’s about using the right visual system at the right distance. In this episode, we break down the fascinating science behind how the brain judges depth and why athletes actually rely on two completely different systems depending on how far th...

This week, we put football players through their paces using Blaze Pod reaction time testing and the results reinforced a truth we’ve seen for decades: elite performance isn’t just about what athletes see… it’s how fast their brain processes visual information and triggers the right response. In football, milliseconds can be the difference between clearing a ball or conceding, winning a duel or lo...

After decades of working with elite athletes and championship teams, one question keeps coming up again and again: “Can you scientifically prove that vision training improves performance?” In this episode, we tackle the reality behind that question and explain why the issue isn’t whether sports vision works… it’s why traditional proof is so hard to produce in elite sport. We break down the statist...