Vision Therapy Exercises You Can Do at Home
While glasses and contact lenses can help improve your vision’s sharpness, they don’t do much to help inefficiencies in your visual skills. At Opticomart Eye Clinic & Optical we’ve adopted a range of different vision therapy techniques to help strengthen these skills so you can confidently rely on your vision.
Our team of eye care professionals monitors vision therapy exercises, but there are various exercises you can perform at home to help encourage these skills even if you’re not in our office. However, to help achieve the results you’re looking for, make sure you’re visiting our team for all of your vision therapy exercises.
Around The World
It’s always important that your eye’s muscles are still getting the right amount of exercise to manage tracking and saccading problems.
For Around the World, find a place where you can either sit or stand uninterrupted for a few minutes. Then, look straight up for 3 seconds and look down for 3 seconds. Settle your eyes on something ahead of you, then look to the left for 3 seconds and then the right for 3 seconds.
After these movements, look to the top left and the top right for the same amount of time. Finish the exercise by rotating your eyes clockwise for 2 turns and counter-clockwise for another 2 turns.
Near & Far Focusing
Focusing is a considerable part of your vision, and exercising can help strengthen this skill so you can rely more confidently on your eyesight.
All you need to do is to pick an object around 10 to 20 meters away to look at and stick out your thumb in front of you. Simply switch your focus from your thumb to the object 5 times.
Alphabet Ball
The alphabet ball exercise is a fantastic way to accomplish a couple of things with your vision: hand-eye coordination, tracking, or even conditions like amblyopia and strabismus.
Draw letters on a ball or balloon. Pass the ball to a partner and have them call out the last letter they see before catching it. You do the same when they pass the ball to you. Perform this exercise for a couple of minutes.
This is also a great exercise to help children with their vision while also getting them moving around!
Pencil Pushups
Take any pencil you have and hold it out in front of your face. Focus on a single letter on the pencil, slowly bring it closer until you see double, and then start the exercise again. This exercise is supposed to be done for 15 minutes a day, 5 days a week.
This exercise helps correct problems with binocular vision, including conditions like strabismus and amblyopia.
Reading, Writing, Puzzles, & Mazes
Performing up-close tasks like reading and writing are not only great for improving brain function, they’re also fantastic for improving visual skills like visual pursuing and shifting your focus between targets, also known as saccading.
Figure 8
Figure 8 exercises can help improve flexibility in the muscles that control your eyes. You can perform this exercise by imagining a large figure 8 on it’s side just 10 or so feet ahead of you (around 3 or 4 metres). Trace the figure 8 with your eyes for a few minutes. Switch to the opposite direction for the same amount of time.
Blinking
We unconsciously blink all the time. However, when you’re focusing on an up-close task for a long time, it can cause eye strain.
Consciously blinking can give your eyes a short break from their task while also reinforcing your tear film, which can dry out if you stop blinking for a while.
Relax
Just like blinking, relaxing your vision will help you alleviate symptoms related to eye strain. One of the most common exercises optometrists recommends includes the 20/20/20 rule.
Every 20 minutes, spend 20 seconds looking at something about 20 feet (6 metres) away. This exercise is commonly recommended to help manage symptoms of digital eye strain.