SAFETY & SPORTS

Optiko Eyewear carries quality CSA-approved safety and protective sports eyewear.

If you’re not wearing protective eyewear, consider this:

According to Prevent Blindness America, each year more than 700,000 Americans injure their eyes at work, and another 125,000 injure their eyes at home. More than 40,000 American children and adults suffer eye injuries during sports, while many thousands more eye injuries go unreported.

Because experts say proper protective eyewear could prevent up to 90% of all eye injuries, you might want to learn more about the safety glasses and goggles that suit your lifestyle best.

Any sport in which balls, racquets or flying objects are present pose a potential for eye injury.

Sports such as racquetball, tennis and badminton may seem relatively harmless, but they involve moving objects moving at 60 miles per hour or faster. During a typical game, a racquetball can travel between 60 and 200 miles per hour.

Another potential danger is that the racquets themselves move at high speed in a confined space and could strike a player.

Flying objects aren’t the only hazard. Many eye injuries come from pokes and jabs by fingers and elbows, particularly in games where players are in close contact with each other. Basketball, for example, has an extremely high rate of eye injury. So does swimming, where no flying objects are involved.

These are great reasons to wear protective eyewear. Enhancing performance is another important aspect of eye protection. It used to be common for people with mild to moderate prescriptions to simply participate in sports without wearing their eyeglasses or contacts. Coaches and players soon recognized that clear, sharp vision is a vital ingredient in sports performance, and participating in sports with less than 20/20 vision is counterproductive.

Optiko Eyewear carries a fantastic selection of safety and sports eyewear. Visit our store to find safety eyewear today.