Advice for a nearsighted eyeglass wearer

[Learner]

Originally posted by David Mitchell:
By all means talk with your optometrist about this.  My son is an optometrist and avid bowhunter and makes it a point to ask his patients about their sports and leisure activities.  They can do all sorts of things to get your correction where it needs to be.  I have a friend who does a lot of interior painting and has a pair of glasses just for that that have the bifocal portion at the top of the lens so he is in focus when looking up at what he is working on.

Wow!  What a great solution for your friend's situation.  Thank you for sharing this!

Best wishes,
Frank

[Orion]

ThoughI don't have as severe a correction as you do, my glasses actually help me to align my eye properly over the arrow. If I look sideways over the arrow, my vision in my dominant eye is somewhat blurred.  I correct this by turning my head more toward the target so I'm looking at the critter more directly over the arrow, not across it.  

Opening your stance a bit helps accomplish this, as others have pointed out.  Regardless, just need to turn your head more toward the target. Good luck.

[Mark Baker]

What Jerry says...

Open your stance....I also have moved my anchor to the front of my mouth.  This helps with the head "angle" as I look at the target. I lose about an inch of drawlength though, and I naturally want to draw to the corner of my mouth.  Been shooting this way my whole life as I am nearsighted and wear glasses always.  Try it...might be an easy solution.

[UMLarcher]

Hi All,

Professional Optician here. There are some good suggestions above. It would help to know what kind of shooting you're doing. I'd have different suggestions for target vs hunting.

Someone mentioned having the focal point of the right lens moved over so you can use the corner of your eye more. That's a great solution for target shooting, (popular with rifle shooters) but you won't be able to comfortably walk around like that. You'd have to keep your head turned to the side all the time or you'd get terrible nausea/headaches.

If you're going to be walking around or hunting in the same lenses you want to shoot with, single vision distance would be my suggestion. Since the whole lens is dedicated to one Rx (as opposed to a multifocal that has 2-3) it will have more usable area and give you a little more peripheral vision. In some cases a very strong distance Rx would negate the benefit, so you'll want to talk to your optician about that.

There may be other solutions that your optician can come up with as well. I've worked with contractors and golfers to come up with some pretty interesting lenses. Good luck!

-Matt