If you are serious about your sport or require specialty eyewear for your job or hobby, it’s worth scheduling a specialty eyewear fitting with your eye doctor. In addition to safety and eye protection, top athletic and occupational performance requires optimal visual acuity as well as a number of other visual functions such as peripheral vision, depth perception and hand-eye coordination. Sometimes color vision, eye tracking, night vision, and light adaptation are also critical to performance. Your eye doctor will be able to do a full assessment of your vision while understanding your personal vision needs in order to recommend the best possible eyewear solution for you.
A standard comprehensive eye exam will not usually test for some of the additional visual and perceptual skills you need for serious sports or work environments. Your eye doctor will need to know the details about the skills required and the conditions you face, in order to assess the best performance eyewear for your needs.
While off-the-rack sports or performance eyewear could be sufficient for your needs, if you have particular vision requirements or engage in certain types of activities, you might be a lot better off with a personalized fitting. Every aspect of the glasses from the fit, to the lens tint, to the size and the style, can play a role in enhancing your safety, vision, and performance when it’s the right fit. This is why it makes more sense to fit the glasses to the individual rather than the individual to the glasses.
A sports performance exam may also identify some areas of your vision that could use improvement. When it comes to performance, especially for professionals, it is important to know where your visual skills and abilities stand and to be able to make improvements when possible. Many eye doctors offer vision skills enhancement training for particular vision skills such as hand-eye coordination or visual processing speed using computer simulations and other techniques. This type of training can enhance your performance whether it is in hitting a fastball, shooting a puck or aiming for a bullseye.
When it comes to sports and performance, your vision should be a given. With a specialty eyewear fitting, you can find the eyewear that offers the most, comfort, safety, protection and vision enhancement for your particular needs.
Advantages of Contact Lenses for Sports
Better peripheral vision & safer than regular prescription glasses. Compared with eyeglasses, contact lenses offer a number of advantages to enhance your vision for sports competition:
- Better peripheral vision. Though sports eyeglasses can be made with large, wraparound-style lenses, most prescription eyeglasses have small, relatively flat lenses and small frames. This significantly limits peripheral vision essential for many sports.
- Unobstructed field of view. Contact lenses also provide a wide, unobstructed field of view, because no eyeglass frames block or distort what you see. You can view more of your surroundings and react faster to objects coming at you and to other players around you. You also can more easily see and react to ground balls or other objects at your feet.
- Less likelihood of fogging up or getting splattered. Unlike eyeglasses, contacts usually remain clear regardless of environment or weather conditions such as rain.
- Less chance of injury. Eyeglasses may break and cause an eye injury if you take a hard hit, but contact lenses won’t.
- More stable vision. When you wear eyeglasses, you can feel frames move slightly on your face with each stride. And you can have vision disturbances with eyeglasses when you run. With contact lenses, you also don’t need to worry about eyeglasses sliding down your nose or falling off.
- Better compatibility with safety equipment. For sports that require headgear or protective goggles, contact lenses don’t interfere with the fit or comfort of these safety devices.