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Exercise for your eyes

How do exercises help the eye?
They help the eye in two important ways: mechanically and optically. a) Mechanically: They improve mechanical stability of the eye by co-ordinating and strengthening the eye muscles. They strengthen the convergence power of the eye and balance its function with that of accommodation. (b) Optically: They improve the optical image co-ordination between the two eyes, thus permitting a proper three-dimensional accurate picture to be received and subsequently evaluated by the brain.


How do eye exercises help in the mechanical stability of the eye?
They increase the range of movement of an eye, especially by exercising a weak muscle.
They permit eye movement, especially in persons who wear spectacles or have their eyes fixed at a particular position for long periods, like typesetters and painters. This relieves congestion and permits a more comfortable vision.
If properly done, they can reduce an imbalance between the convergence and accommodation, thus reducing eye strain and headaches.
In an eye which has a squint, exercising a particular group of muscles can cure or radically reduce a squint. Even if a squint is surgically operated, the use of exercises can build up the capacity of the eye to virtually normal limits.
They improve the power of the eye to maintain convergence in depressed position (the eye turns in and bends down during the most important activity of modern life — reading) and thus permit long comfortable application to near work.


What do eye exercises not do? Where do they give no help?
Basically, if the theory of the eye is understood, it is fairly clear where exercises would obviously be futile:
In lowering the spectacle number.
In curing cataract or glaucoma or for that matter, any organic disability in the eye.
In curing large degrees of squint for which surgery is still the only recourse.


Thus the exercises should be:
Vertical and horizontal movement of the eye to the maximum extremes every 30 minutes especially if you are sitting in front of a computer monitor or studying long hours

Palming: (made famous by Bates of “better vision without glasses”) Applying a cupped palm on the eye relaxes tired eyes.

Relaxing accomodation after long hours at any near point activity by flexing the accommodative muscles (the ciliary muscle in the eye), by looking far and then at a point near you rapidly 10 times.

It is the effort to maintain fixation at a jumping rapidly moving object which tires the internal eye mechanism leading to eye strain. The eye is designed to work best in a position of depressed convergence, ie, 25 degrees down and in. As long as that angulation is maintained whether you lie on the stomach and read or not has no real relevance.

In a similar vein, reading in a dim light leads to overstrain as the eyes to function in poor light need to enlarge the pupils to enhance the quantum of light entering the eye, which leads to a loss of fixation and blurry vision. An effort to compensate the strain will lead to persistent headaches

Written by James · Filed Under Eye Care 

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