Sports Eyewear and Sports Vision

Although for some individuals eyeglasses can pose difficulty in playing sports at a competitive level, specifically-tinted sports eyewear can provide an advantage in outdoor sports played at daytime. For those seeking a competitive edge, tinted sports eyeglasses eliminate distracting glare and bright sunlight and increase the ability of the athlete to concentrate on exercising their skills successfully.

Sports eyewear can be tinted in nearly any color and opacity, each of which is suited to a particular activity due to the light waves that it allows to pass into the wearer's eyes. For skiing, shooting, and piloting aircraft, yellow-tinted lenses are ideal because they eliminate blue light, providing greater perception of detail and distance in overcast, foggy, and cloudy conditions. In addition, when dealing with blue backgrounds, such as sky or water, yellow tints create a sharper visual image.

For sports such as automobile racing, or other sports for which true color perception is important, a gray tint shields the eyes from glare and bright light, while preserving colors more effectively than other tints. This full transmission of color ensures that people playing outdoor sports can maintain their response times and clearly perceive field markings, balls, and other players.

Red- and rose-tinted lenses provide a significant relief to eyes working in bright lights or engaged in such outdoor sports as cycling and fishing. Although these lenses cause substantial color imbalances, they increase contrast in bright and partly sunny conditions, augmenting the eyes' ability to identify detail that may be far away, covered by water, or moving at a rapid pace.

For sports such as tennis and golf, brown-tinted lenses provide a balance between increased contrast and color purity. This combination allows for a better ability to judge distance, which is essential for sports which center on distance perception. Amber-tinted lenses provide a similar benefit, although the degree is determined by the opacity of the amber.

Green tints offer significant contrast in low-light situations, providing the best visual acuity of any tint. Like yellow tints, green tints can also filter blue light to provide for greater visual clarity. For baseball players, as well as golfers, green tints are an ideal eyeglass tint to provide the proper visual experience for the tasks performed while playing.

In addition to tints, photochromic lenses can provide protection against glare. In the presence of UV light, photochromic lenses alter their tint to block out UV and a portion of visual light. Some photochromics are available which will transform from one color to another in the presence of UV light. In addition to blocking out glare, photochromics can allow the wearer to use the same pair of glasses for outdoor sports which are played both in the dark and in the sunlight.

Tinted and photochromic lenses provide a myriad of benefits, particularly by allowing the user requiring vision correction to continue to use eyeglasses while also blocking out glare and harmful UV rays and only allowing the light rays which will most be the most beneficial.

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