if you're a long-term gamer or computer user I'm going to show you three eye exercises that
could actually improve your vision your eye health or overall eye Comfort let's focus in
these first two exercises are usually found in eye doctors offices where they use them
for vision therapy or orthopic training to help train a patient's eyes to be able to work and team
together and that's where these exercises usually shine in the office but sometimes they'll give
these exercises as homework so the patient can do them at home help train their eyes even further
the first one is actually designed to help what's called convergence insufficiency convergence is
the eye's ability to turn in to look at a Target that's close up like the computer screen or your
phone if you have convergence insufficiency your eyes struggle with keeping that Target single
looking at something up close and that could lead to eye strain sometimes double vision or
blurry vision so to help train your convergence you're going to do a classic at home eye exercise
called pencil push-ups so for this one you want to grab a pencil or a pen and you're going to use the
top of the pen or the Eraser of the pencil as your target so again the goal of this exercise
is to strengthen those converging muscles that brings the eyes into that Target so to start this
exercise you're going to bring that pencil out at arm's length and remember looking at the Eraser
of the Target and you're going to slowly bring it closer to your eyes or to your nose now you want
to keep that eraser clear and you want to keep it single if it goes blurry or splits into two
goes double vision that's when you stop and you want to hold it there you want to hold it right
on the edge of it going blurry or going double and you want to hold it there for five seconds
one two three four five now you want to repeat this five times you're going to do it five times
holding it there at that edge for five seconds and the goal is to try and get it closer to your
nose closer to your eyes every time that you do it so by doing this it's possible to improve and
strengthen your converging muscles so if you're doing a long-term computer use or looking at
something up close there's less likely of a chance that your eyes will fatigue or get tired or get
double vision or that your vision will actually stay clear and not get blurry exercise number two
focuses on your eyes ability to focus when you look at a close object like your phone tablet
or computer screen you're doing something called accommodation or you're focusing on that object
the muscle groups that converge your eyes and the muscle groups that accommodate or Focus your eyes
are really closely linked together so working on an exercise that helps your focusing is really
going to help the easiest exercise to do at home to help with this is something called a distance
near focusing you're going to have a Target far away 20 feet away six meters something where you
can completely relax your focusing muscles and then a near Target a lot of people just stick
their thumb out at arm's length and use their thumb or you can use the pencil that you just
use for the pencil push-ups and you're going to alternate your focusing first starting at
your distance relaxing your muscles keeping that distance clear for five seconds and then switch
to the near Target making sure that near Target is clear and single and hold it for five seconds this
is where you're working on that focusing muscle and then you're going to relax again and look far
away you're going to alternate this five times but yeah this will work on your accommodation muscles
and a little bit of your convergence muscles and the pencil push-ups will work on your convergence
and a little bit of your accommodation as well so you can kind of see how the two eye exercises are
linked to cover both those muscle groups now I do want to say really quick that these eye exercises
aren't meant to make you less nearsighted or less farsighted they won't improve your vision that way
that whole concept is for a different discussion for a different video and bottom line if you are
having eye strain or blurry vision you definitely want to get an eye exam by your eye doctor to
accurately know what's going on with your eyes now this third exercise I think is probably one
of the more slept on eye exercises but probably one of the more important ones that you can do and
that's called blinking exercises now when we stare at screens our blink rate drops by 60 percent that
causes the surface of our eyes to dry out they get red and irritated it can cause blurry vision it
can cause incomplete blinks so we over time start to Blink a lot less and don't blink fully so we
have a little strip in our eyes that gets left to be exposed to the air now my recommendation
is to do this frequently a lot of times we tell people to do what's called the 20 20 rule every
20 minutes you take a 20 second break like 20 feet away this could be a good opportunity to
do blinking exercises in that break so let me show you how to do a version of some blinking exercises
so during that break you're going to look far away and close your eyes focusing on keeping your eyes
fully closed doing a complete blink and you're going to hold it for two seconds and then open
now the next blink you're going to close your eyes and you're actually going to contract your eyelid
muscles now here's where It's Tricky is you don't want to use your cheek muscles and your forehead
muscles to close your eyelid you want to use your eyelid muscles and sometimes you can hold
your feet finger right by your ocular bone your temporal ocular bone right there and feel your
eyelid muscles flex and making sure it's not your cheek and your forehead but you do a forced eyelid
close one two and then open and then you can do a regular blink keeping it a complete blink one two
open close and force blink one two open close one two and you can repeat that five times now
this will help tone the eyelid muscles help you create complete blinks in the future and hopefully
help keep your eyes from drying out and help your overall comfort and your vision now to go further
into detail blinking blinking exercises the science behind blinking I did a full video how to
Blink and I definitely recommend checking it out this will show you why blinking is so important
and I show you some programs that you can get on the computer to help remind you to Blink
and do these blinking exercises super important I'm Dr. Neal Guymon, Dr. EyeGuy, stay focused