Vision therapy exercises are a set of routines that could train the eye muscles to achieve appropriate visual habits. You see, our eyes are really important. As our eyes enable us to do our daily tasks with coordination, they also allow us to see the beauty of the world. Researches reveal that the eye responds to most of the physiological activities of the human body.
So if we do not exert conscious effort in correcting our bad visual habits, then we can develop or even worsen eye problems such as myopia and nearsightedness. This selection discusses several eye strengthening exercises that you can do to achieve crystal-clear eyesight and rely less on eyeglasses.
Before doing any vision improvement activities, make sure that you undergo a sight assessment examination to know the condition of your eyes. Some exercises work better for certain conditions. When you overdo any specific activity, you might notice soreness and stiffness of your eye muscles. Of course, nobody would want that to happen.
If you are doing vision therapy exercises for the first time, remember not to take any stretching-eye exercise until you’ve already relieved the venous congestion in your eye areas. Instead, you can do simple exercises such as blinking and eye relaxing exercises. The blinking exercise involves opening and closing your eyes gently for consecutive times. When we blink, the tension around our eyeballs was relieved.
One relaxing exercise that you can do, on the other hand, is the so-called “palming” technique. It can be done by briskly rubbing your hands together until they generate sufficient heat to calm your eyes. Cup your palms over your closed eyes and hold this position for a few minutes until you feel relaxed.
Poor eyesight is not solely due to poor eye habits; stress has also a lot to say about our visual performance. This is one of the common factors for shortsightedness as well. Thus, it goes to show that we should relax our eyes often, especially if we’ve been using them for a long time.
To be able to use our eyes as a team is an essential visual skill that we should master. Some vision therapy exercises can promote perfectly coordinated eye movements so that we can begin to see clearly without glasses.
One basic move which you can administer yourself requires the use of your thumb. During any time of the day, you may extend your arm and watch your thumb as you hold it out. With your head still, watch your thumb as it slowly moves in a a pattern of circles and crosses. You can do little improvisation by using tiny objects to stare at.
Also, you can try eye exercises that enhance your ability to follow fast-moving objects. Good vision requires our eyes to move at a high speed though we are only watching a single object. This exercise can be done by suspending an object at your ceiling and allowing it to swing back-and-forth. Make sure that the object lies parallel before your eyes so you will not strain your neck. As the object swings, you have to follow that object using your eyes. The key to this type of exercise is to increase the speed of the object you are staring at gradually. The more rapid your eyes can shift, the closer to 20/20 vision you may achieve.
Basic Vision Therapy Exercises
Our eyes usually get exhausted if you spend long hours doing close-focus work. As a result, we experience low visual acuity with blurred vision. One suitable remedy that we can do in such a case is to take a short break and stare at a distant object, about eight feet away from you. By doing so, we can control how we use and aim our eyes since our eyes should be able to focus at different distances. Also, this focus-training exercise can also relax our eyes since our eyes need relaxation too to relieve stress and tension, thereby gradually we can rebuild our vision.
There is also a vision enhancement routine that enhances your eyes’ ability to focus. You can do this by getting a newspaper clipping or any textbook and focus on a tiny object on the page, such as a period sign or a word. Instead of focusing on that tiny object alone, make sure that you also pay attention to its surroundings so you will not exhaust your eyes too much. Make use of your central and peripheral vision in this exercise. After doing this exercise, you might feel that your eyes became more relaxed and slackened.
If there are exercises for focus training, there are also available exercises for directionality training. This pertains to the goal of vision therapy exercises to develop better control over the directional mechanism of your eyes. This exercise had you swing your eyes from the left and right sides alternately. You can also rotate your eyes in clockwise and counterclockwise directions.
Some vision therapy exercises improve blood circulation around the eye area. This includes massage and squeezing exercises. A simple eye massage can be done by lightly applying pressure around your eyes using your thumb. Begin at your nose bridge and move your thumb around your eyes and back to the side of your nose. For squeezing exercise, all you have to do is to squeeze all your facial muscles by firmly closing your eyes for 3-5 seconds. Repeat this routine for 7-8 times. This exercise can relieve eye tension and can also correct the squinting habit.
After doing some of the exercises suggested above for one week, you should notice sufficient improvement that will encourage you to continue the work. Naturally, to achieve 20/20 vision will take persistence and consistency. You can either practice all of the exercises suggested above or you can do a combination. A tip in choosing the best exercise plan is to track which exercise the best suits your condition and stick with that plan until you attain a desirable outcome.
The good thing about “vision therapy exercises” is that you don’t need to spend hours in doing the exercise. You might ask if your eyes get worse again after you stop doing the exercise. The answer is no. Remember that these activities were designed to make you accustomed with proper visual habits. In other words, you are training your visual system to correct itself. Eventually, you will learn how to use your eyes properly after doing them regularly over some time.