experiencelifemag.com

Print › | Back ›

Get Vision up to Speed

The first and most obvious step in vision training — for any athlete — is to attain 20/20 vision. If you aren’t seeing clearly, you can special-order goggles with prescription lenses, as well as corrective sport frames for running and biking (check out www.rudyproject.com). Contact lenses are another obvious choice, and many athletes are turning to surgical correction, too.

“If someone is doing well in corrective lenses and can put up with the hassle involved, there’s no need to make any optical correction changes,” says Barry L. Seiller, MD, founder of the Visual Fitness Institute and Vizual Edge, a software company, in Vernon Hills, Ill. The downside to contact lenses, he adds, is that they can get dislodged or can shift slightly, not to mention get lost, broken or torn. “In cases like this, athletes might be better off having laser vision correction surgery, assuming they’re a good candidate,” he says.

Another corrective and nonsurgical option is corneal refractive therapy (CRT). “In the right candidate, CRT can reduce nearsightedness down to zero,” says Sue E. Lowe, OD, who specializes in vision therapy at the Snowy Range Vision Center in Laramie, Wyo., and is the former chair of the sports-vision section for the American Optometric Association. With this method, the patient sleeps in special hard lenses for anywhere from six weeks to six months. The lenses eventually alter the shape of the cornea.