Eye Health

Eye Training Exercise

Try the following exercises to help improve voluntary control of these muscles to improve vision, focus eyes quickly to different distances, and offset age-related vision decline:

1. Smooth Pursuit Eye Task – Practice following a small object with your eyes. Try to follow the object with smooth eye movements — not allowing eyes to dart from one point to another.
   • In nature, practice this type of eye movement by watching a bird in flight. Or, during a sports game, try smoothly tracking a tennis ball, golf ball or hockey puck. You can also practice this exercise at your computer.
   • Try to complete this type of exercise for 2-3 minutes, 3x per week.
2. Near-Far Exercises – Accommodation is the eye’s ability to adjust focus to objects near or farther away by changing the optics of the eye and lens itself. As some of you might have already experienced, this ability naturally declines with age, and it takes more time to focus on objects at different distances (e.g., focusing on a server at a restaurant, then looking down to read the menu).
   • Train eye muscles by visually focusing on a pen or other small object positioned about 1.5 feet in front of your eyes. Slowly, move the object closer toward your nose while keeping the object in focus. Continue to move the object closer and closer until the image gets blurry.
     • With practice, your ability to move the object nearer to you while maintaining sharp focus will improve. The effort involved will also be less over time.
     • You can also practice this exercise in reverse: focus on an object near to you, then move it farther away.
   • Improve your control of eye muscles and the associated neural connections by practicing this exercise for around 1-2 minutes every other day.