My Journey with Sports Vision

I've gotten a number of questions about the relationship between our eyesight and vision, and our sports performance. So today I wanted to talk about my experience with sports and how I have worked with athletes. Enjoy the show. If you want more, sign up for my newsletter at: www.drsamberne.com. SUMMARY KEYWORDS sports, vision, working, play, talk, therapy, moved, camp, Herbie, flutist, peripheral vision, NFL, NBA, helped, athletes, sporting, jazz musician, Santa Fe, basketball Hello, everyone, it’s Dr. Sam, I’d like to welcome you to my EyeClarity podcast. This is a show that offers cutting-edge information on how to improve your vision and overall wellness through holistic methods. I so appreciate you spending part of your day with me. If you have questions, you can send them to [email protected]. Now to the latest EyeClarity episode. Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Sam. And I'd like to welcome you to another EyeClarity podcast. So I get a number of questions on the relationship between our eyesight and vision, and our sports performance. And I don't talk a lot about my sporting interests, but I have many of them. And so I want I thought, today I would weave into the show some of my professional experiences with personal experiences as a relates to sports. So I'll speak personally first. You know, I'm, you probably can tell from my pictures and videos that, you know, I've got some gray hair at this point. But when I was younger, I used to play a lot of competitive sports. And probably my favorite sport was basketball. And when I was growing up, I grew up in central Pennsylvania. And so a lot of my friends, we would talk a lot about the NBA and we talked about the Philadelphia 70 Sixers, that was the time when we had the players Dr. J. Julius Erving and Moses Malone, and they actually won a championship. And my friends and I used to play a lot of basketball. And I was a really good guard, I played point guard. And, you know, when I went to college, you know, mostly play just intramurals intramural basketball, but was really high level. And then when I went to optometry school in Philadelphia, I was playing in a number of leagues, you know, in between the intensive studies that I had to put in. So basketball was always something I was really interested in. And I had the good fortune, and one of my internships, which was out in San Diego, where I was working in practice, it was one of my mentors and teachers, Dr. Robert Santa, and Dr. Santa was very involved in vision therapy. And he was working with the men's Olympic volleyball players, when I was interning at the office. And so I got to be one of the, you know, the, the support people in some of the vision therapy exercises that Dr. Santa was, was promoting and doing and he had had a lot of experience and success working with very high level athletes. So I was very grateful to be you know, as an intern, I was kind of at the lowest rung of the ladder. But I learned a lot, I absorbed a lot about the importance of things like peripheral vision, visual reaction time, visual tracking. And in this particular situation, what I observed was that these men's volleyball players actually really improved their statistics in terms of spiking the ball and serving the ball. And, you know, in the vision therapy they did, there was an article that was written about the vision therapy that helped them win the gold medal, and that was really, because of Dr. Santa and his expertise. But I got to be got to be a part of that. And I saw the relationship between our vision and our sports. So fast forward, you know, I after my internship in San Diego, I moved back to the Philadelphia area. And, you know, when I started my practice in Philly, I began working with, you know,