Tips for Wearing Glasses at the Gym

Exercise is an important part of living a healthy life. Exercise helps improve your physical health in several ways, including reducing your risk of diseases like cancer, Type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Additionally, regular exercise helps with your mental health, by helping reduce or manage symptoms of anxiety and depression.

Gyms offer equipment and classes that can help you form a regular exercise habit.
While you don’t need much to start working out, typically there are a few must-have items that each person brings to the gym. These could include activewear, water bottles, and necessary accessories such as your glasses to enable working out. Working out with your glasses may seem counterintuitive, but there are several ways you can make it easier and reduce the risk of damage to your frames.

Adjust Your Frames

Everyday activities can cause your glasses frames to become crooked or loose. If your glasses don’t fit properly, they’re more likely to fall off or break while doing physical activity. You can tell if you need to adjust your frames if:

• Your glasses give you headaches that resolve when you take the frames off;
• You are constantly having to push up your glasses, even when sitting still;
• Your glasses feel as if they’re sitting at different heights on your face.

You can purchase precision screwdrivers that will allow you to loosen or tighten the screws of your frames yourself. This can be a great option for temporary fixes, however, glasses can be fragile, and you may not be able to accurately address the problem on your own. Any eye care center or optometrist should be able to adjust your frames to your comfort. Typically, your insurance will cover frame adjustments by your eye care provider, though you’ll want to check your plan to see if this service is limited to a certain number of times per year.

Get a Glasses Strap

A glasses strap can help keep your frames affixed to your face. You can buy these online or at a majority of eyecare or glasses frame sellers. These straps may increase comfort, and even prevent you from losing your frames, as they can be adjusted to hang around your neck. They’re an inexpensive way to keep your sight sharp while working out.

These straps are not only useful at the gym, but can keep your glasses secure during outdoor activities, like sports. They are also helpful for keeping young children’s glasses on their faces.

Pack a Cleaning Cloth

Working out causes a lot of perspiration, which can create smudges on your glasses. Additionally, touching your glasses lenses with sweaty hands also causes smudges. These smudges reduce visibility and negate the benefits of wearing your glasses to the gym in the first place.

Any microfiber cloth can help you keep your glasses clean, keeping your visibility sharp during your workout. Microfiber works best because it is incredibly fine, and made out of synthetic materials, therefore it won’t leave behind any fuzz on your lenses. You can buy these online, or purchase them, along with a cleaning solution, from your eyecare center. You’ll want to avoid using your shirt to clean your glasses while working out, as the cloth is more likely to make smudges worse by imparting sweat, and most t-shirt material isn’t fine enough to clean your lenses— in fact, some can leave minute scratches.

Skip Out on Certain Workouts

If you don’t have a glasses strap, or any other way to keep your glasses affixed to your face, then you may want to skip certain workouts that may cause your glasses to fall off. Some of these exercises include:

• Burpees;
• Floor push-ups;
• Deadlifts.

Other exercises you may want to skip altogether if you’re wearing your glasses, as they could break or become damaged, or you could lose them. These include:

• Sparring;
• Swimming.

Instead of these workouts, you can make substitutions that will still work out the same muscle groups, without putting your glasses in harm’s way. If you want to create a personalized, glasses-friendly workout, you can work with a trainer to design a custom plan.

Ditch the Glasses for Good

One of the easiest ways to work out as a glasses wearer is to not have to wear glasses at all. You could always leave your glasses off at the gym if you don’t have severe vision impairment. However, there are ways that you can still maintain your vision without having to wear glasses.

Contacts are always an option, however, they are more high-maintenance than glasses.For example, sweating in contact lenses runs the risk of having an eye infection. If you have the option, you may even look into hands-free elective surgeries that can correct your vision, like implantable lenses or LASIK eye surgery or implantable lenses such as the EVO ICL. These methods can have more benefits than vision correction, such as addressing eye health conditions like chronic dry eyes or cataracts.

By pursuing these options, you can leave behind your worries about your frames falling off or becoming dirty and interrupting your workout. It can also leave you freer to engage in activities that aren’t necessarily glasses-friendly, like swimming. These corrective surgeries can also pay for themselves in the savings you’ll see from purchasing new frames or lenses that were damaged while working out.

If you’re a glasses wearer, you don’t have to compromise on either being able to see, or being able to workout. Tailoring your workouts to something more frame-friendly, or using a new sports hobby as motivation to take the plunge into corrective surgery are great options.

Be sure to talk to one of our doctors about not only the benefits of vision correction, but also any risks of vision correction that may pertain to your individual needs and circumstances.