Wellness

Golf-Loving CEO? Don’t Forget About Your Eyes Before You Tee Off

December 16, 2024
11:21 pm

By: Seraphina Quinn

If golfing is one of your favorite pastimes as a CEO, you’re not alone. Many Fortune 500 CEOs also frequent the sport—and for good reason. It’s a great way to improve your strategizing and endurance. Golf offers plenty of benefits for your business, as well. We’ve previously noted that golf’s popularity among CEOs lies in the sport being a great way to network and even seal important deals on the green.

Golf can also relieve stress. With all the responsibilities you spearhead, you’re more likely to work longer hours and feel pressured by current events, like economic downturns, that can affect your business. Executive stress can significantly reduce your well-being and negatively impact your life expectancy. Golf can help by getting you outdoors, lifting your mood, improving your physical health, and ultimately ensuring you return to the office recharged.

To make the most of what golf has to offer, however, you have to do more than just prep your clubs—you’ll also want to prioritize your eyesight to ensure better health, safety, and performance. Here’s why you shouldn’t forget your eyes before you tee off:

Golfing and your eyes

You need to see what you’re doing if you want to play well and—if you want to reap the well-being benefits of being outdoors instead of stuck in the office—appreciate the beauty of the course you’re on. Golf is a sport that requires you to traverse great distances. If you have refractive errors like nearsightedness, you can’t adequately estimate the trajectories of your swings. If you’re farsighted, you might find it more challenging to hit your ball accurately.

You’ll also want to be wary of the sun. Its UV rays can gradually damage your eyes and make you more vulnerable to vision loss at an earlier age—significantly impacting your ability to continue your tenure as CEO. Sunlight can also more immediately harm your vision by bouncing off the course’s water hazards and into your eyes. If overwhelmed by glare, your eyes may develop photokeratitis, causing pain, discomfort, and even temporary blindness that can keep you out of the office for a few days. That can be especially inconvenient when you have a heavier workload than usual.

More importantly, however, your eyes will be more vulnerable to injury as you golf. Regardless of whether dirt or debris from the course’s turf or sand traps enters them or balls physically hit them, you’ll be exposed to more factors that can cause infections, injuries—and, in the worst-case scenario, blindness. These risks are something even professional golfers can experience. Recently, Australian prodigy Jeff Guan suffered multiple eye fractures after being hit by a stray shot. After having to be airlifted to the nearest hospital to undergo surgery, he’s now at risk of permanent vision damage and loss.

Given these potential risks—as well as how crucial healthy eyesight is to both playing golf and successfully performing your responsibilities as a CEO—you may thus want to ensure you take the following steps to protect your eyes on the course.

Securing your vision on the course

Donning protective eyewear is an ideal precaution to protect your eyes as you golf. That’s especially true if you get a pair with desired features. You can look at the sunglasses from designer brands to get a good idea of what that looks like. Sunglass Hut’s selection of sporty frames and bestsellers like Oakley’s Radar EV Path provide UV protection as standard and come in wraparound frames that cover more of the eye area to shield against sand and dirt. They also leverage polarized lenses that block glare and enhance contrast, improving how you see the colors of golf balls, sand traps, and water hazards against the green of the golf course. Such models can also accommodate any prescriptions you need to provide vision correction.

However, if you find yourself golfing in the middle of the day, you’ll need more than just golfing sunglasses. Packing a hat means you can shield yourself from the sun as it shines directly overhead, ensuring it won’t affect your performance as you play. A baseball cap can do the job well. To protect your eyes from more angles, however, you may want to opt for a hat at least three inches wide. The golf hats from brands like Adidas show that these won’t get in the way of how you play. As seen on GolfBox’s online catalog, they can go beyond simply protecting your eyes by efficiently wicking moisture to keep you dry and cool—even while golfing on hot days.

Of course, it’s still possible for your eyes to get irritated while golfing. However, you don’t need to let that stop your game altogether. Instead, consider bringing some dedicated golfing eye drops with you. Offered by brands like EyePromise, they’re formulated to support and preserve your vision. They can even shield against the eye-straining effects of excess screen time, which you may be prone to in your work. These eye vitamins are trusted by various sports organizations—from the PGA to the NFL—to improve athletic performance. So, using them to wash your eyes free of dirt and debris and maintain their long-term health is worth it.