Progressive Bifocals And Shooting

I’m not to bifocals yet as I get by with just reading glasses. Still, if you have aging eyes and you wear progressive bifocals, this little video by Bryan Bilenski might just explain why you are having problems with your shooting.

H/T GunTalk


2 thoughts on “Progressive Bifocals And Shooting”

  1. I have a few thoughts on this:

    1) Once you've become accustomed to wearing progressive lenses, positioning the head and eyes is more intuitive to put the subject in focus, and is done without conscious thought.

    2) Correct practice makes all the difference. Shooting handguns and shotguns without corrective lenses leaves everything in a blur to some extent: rear sights, front sights, and target. You do the best you can, and learn to shoot in those conditions. Similarly, as someone who wears progressive lenses, I've trained myself to just look through the top of the lenses. The sights and the target are still somewhat unfocused, just in a different way from when I don't wear any corrective lenses at all. Before I learned to do this, I'm sure I looked pretty silly with my head tilted back so I could look through the appropriate portion of my glasses to have the front sights in focus.

    3) I've never had a problem with progressive lenses and optics on rifles. It always just seemed to work without any specific effort on my part.

  2. I also have the progressive lenses, and tipping my head would draw the front sight into perfect sharpness, but it isn't as instinctive, so I've had to accept a certain minimal blurriness. It isn't anywhere near as much as it would be uncorrected, which would really be shooting blind, and it doesn't seem to hurt the scores. I could correct by tipping my head back, but that isn't as natural or as quick, so I'm used to the minimal blurriness.
    Shooting rifle, now, the front sight is far enough out that it's sharp with the top of the gradient, so my cheek weld hasn't changed from pre-Presbyopia to now.

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