Here are certain eye muscle exercises to reduce stress and irritation of the eyes and enhance eyesight. You can easily try these at home.
Most people often resort to exercising their body muscles for a good and healthy lifestyle, and there have been proven benefits of regular muscle exercises. While taking care of their body, fitness enthusiasts can also focus on eye exercises for better eyesight. Although it can safely be stated that eye exercises won’t be anyways effective in treating any serious eye conditions such as astigmatism, myopia, or hyperopia, otherwise known as refractive errors, exercising the eye in a proper manner can significantly help with optimizing the visual skills.
Vision therapy has shown effective solutions to certain eye problems like eye turn or strabismus, lazy eye or amblyopia, eye tracking or saccadic dysfunction, and eye teaming or convergence insufficiency. Consultations from an eye specialist on how to exercise the eyes properly can be of significant help. However, there are certain eye muscle exercises that can be done at home. Here are a few of such exercises:
1. Pencil pushups
Pencil push-ups are basically the process where the eyes can be trained to move in toward one another or converge when looking at a near object. The exercise can easily be done at home by holding a pencil at arm’s length, focusing on the tip, and slowly moving the pencil closer to the nose while keeping the tip at a single focus. The process can be repeated several times.
2. Brock string
Brock string is a popular vision therapy that can be used to train the visual system. To effectively do the exercise, one needs to tie a loop on each end of the string, attach one loop to a doorknob, position three beads, place the distant bead close to the doorknob, the middle one 2-5 feet away and the nearest one 6 inches from the nose. The exercise can significantly train the eyes in tracking, aligning and focusing.
3. Palms for relaxation
The eyes can easily be relaxed with the palms by positioning the hands with the base of the right pinkie on the base of the left pinkie and making an upside-down V movement. The exercise can be performed for at least five minutes a day at any relaxing time.
4. Rolling the eyes
To get easy relief from eye strain, one can just sit up, keep the head still and look to the right, then to the ceiling, then to the left and down to the floor and keep repeating the process for a few times. This exercise can be performed at any time when the eyes are strained.
5. Tratak karma / focusing
Very much similar to meditation, tratak karma involves a process in which a minute point of target is seen continuously till there are tears in the eyes.
6. Figure of 8
In this exercise, one should be in a seated position, pick a point on the floor around 10 ft in front of them, focus on it imagining figure 8 and keep tracking for 30 seconds and then switch the direction.
7. 20-20-20 rule
The 20-20-20 rule is a simple eye exercise technique and is often suggested by the eye specialists, especially for those who spend a lot of time gazing at the screen. The rule states that if someone is spending 20 minutes looking at a screen, s/he should look away at something 20 feet away from them for at least 20 seconds.
Eye exercises should be avoided for certain eye conditions like dyslexia, blinking a lot, squint, having eye spasms or paralyzed eye muscles, etc. For safe practices, it is always suggestible that the exercises are performed with consultation from a doctor to avoid negative impacts like blurred vision, eye strain and increased light sensitivity.
(Inputs: Dr. Mandeep Singh Basu, CEO of Jagat Pharma & Director of Dr. Basu Eye Hospital)
