Many athletes choose contact lenses because of the competitive advantage they can provide.
More than half of American adults have vision problems such as nearsightedness, farsightedness, and astigmatism and need corrective lenses.
Eyeglasses should be your first choice of vision correction but even if you’ve worn contact lenses in the past and found they weren’t that comfortable after a long day, you could try them part-time for sports and recreation.
Advantages of Contact Lenses for Sports
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.
An added advantage of daily disposable contact lenses is that you don’t have to worry about daily lens care and storage. Wear the lenses for your game or for a day of fun, and then simply throw them away.