Every so often in the dôjô, the question is raised of whether glasses or contact lenses are better suited for martial arts training. I would like to offer my thoughts, based on my experiences with both glasses and contact lenses. I’ll also convey the comments of a doctor of opthamology regarding risks of contact lenses in high-intensity physical activity.

I am very nearsighted. With my eyes in an uncorrected state, when the doctor says, “Read the chart on the far wall,” I need excellent lighting just to be able to pick out the wall itself. From second grade through senior high school, I wore glasses; from freshman year of college until the present (more than 25 years), I have worn contacts. I made the switch for purely practical reasons. Having reached an age that afforded increasing opportunities to discard clothing in the company of a member of the opposite sex, I discovered that the first thing to go was always the glasses. After the glasses, it didn’t matter what else came off — I couldn't see anything anyway. Ergo, contacts.

Both contacts and glasses take some getting used to. Depending on which side one is looking through, glasses frame either one’s eyes or the world. Having the world obscured by a frame can be annoying, especially in an environment such as the dôjô where it is very important to keep track of multiple threats, targets and innocent bystanders. Even worse is the fact that, in a pair of glasses, the lens stops at the frame. While it probably wouldn’t matter to someone requiring only minor correction, a seriously nearsighted person wearing glasses has virtually no peripheral vision. In the dôjô, what you can’t see can hurt you.

Contact lenses allow natural, unrestricted vision in all directions. A new contact lens wearer, however, must accommodate a period of physical discomfort while the eyes adjust to a decreased rate of oxygen exchange. (Yes, the eyes do breathe.) Modern, gas-permeable contacts make the adjustment much easier than in the past and allow much longer and more comfortable wearing of lenses. In most respects, contacts are more difficult to maintain than glasses: they must be kept clean, they must be properly stored, and they are a royal pain to locate if dropped.

Even at the equivalent correction, what is seen through contacts and glasses can vary substantially. When I say that contacts allow natural vision, I mean that everything appears as it should, without distortion and in proper proportions. At high levels of correction, glasses present a compromised picture of the world. At the outside edges of the lenses, straight lines curve, walls bend inward, and objects are laterally compressed. Even through the central portion of a strong lens, viewed objects appear to be as much as 15% to 20% smaller than they actually are. Personally, the only time in training I want something to appear smaller than it really is is any time I have to line up opposite Mr. Knight.

Although a good case can be made for the superiority of contacts over glasses in terms of optical quality, it must be emphasized that the difference is probably only apparent at high levels of correction. A person requiring only minor correction may consider other factors present in martial training, such as the potential for eye injury, to be of greater importance when choosing between glasses and contact lenses.

Fortunately, when examining the issue of impact injuries, I have a broad base of experience on which to draw. While wearing glasses as a high school gymnast, I repeatedly used the floor or a piece of equipment to mold my glasses frames to the exact contours of my head. Later, while wearing contacts through years of karate practice, I raised the little known technique of shômen-uke (receiving an attack with one’s face) to a virtual art form. It’s easy to assume that glasses after an impact need only be repaired and, on the surface, it would seem that being hit in the eye while wearing contacts would always be serious. Actually, neither statement is necessarily true.

My experience is that broken glasses pose a greater threat to one’s eyes than do damaged contact lenses. I have been hit in the eyes with bare fists, 16 ounce boxing gloves, and everything in between. I have never had a lens break in my eye. I have, however, been cut by breaking glasses. While wearing contacts, I have had two injuries to my left eye that I consider to have been serious. In the first incident, I was providing a stationary target to someone whose depth perception suddenly went south. I was punched in the eye hard enough to drive the edge of the lens slightly into the cornea. Treatment required an eye patch and medicine for a week.

In the second incident, I was demonstrating to a student how he opened the line to his head whenever he attacked, making it very easy to counter him. Naturally, the damn mudansha took full advantage of the situation and drove his fist halfway through my skull. I was wearing head gear, but I still sustained a vitreal separation, in which the clear gel filling the eye was disconnected from the interior wall. This injury healed over time with no special treatment other than monitoring, but for a long time I saw flashes of light in my left eye whenever I quickly turned my head.

Pardon the war stories, because there is a point here to be made. In both cases, the doctor treating me said that the injuries would have been worse had I not been wearing my contact lenses.

For this article, I spoke again to Dr. Ernest Coleman, an opthamologist and surgeon, to be certain my information is accurate. Dr. Coleman told me that modern hard contact lenses are large enough to distribute an impact over a greater area of the eye, thereby mitigating its effect. Dr. Coleman stated clearly that he knows of no instance of an impact injury to an eye in which the injury was in any way aggravated by the presence of a contact lens. Dr. Coleman pointed out that soft lenses do not offer any protection from impacts, but do tend to be much more difficult to dislodge accidentally than hard lenses. For someone considering the choice between glasses and contacts, Dr. Coleman agrees that contacts pose no greater risk for someone participating in martial arts.