Have you ever tried eye yoga exercises?
If you’re an avid reader, you regularly watch TV or you spend a lot of your time looking at a screen, you’ll likely be familiar with eye strain.
It’s something that many of us experience, particularly as we are so often presented with new means of entertainment and virtual communication.
Our eyes are always working hard – so it’s important that we take the time to give them some attention.
In this week’s blog, we’re taking a look at some of the best eye yoga exercises to help strengthen your eye muscles:
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The Pen: Convergence
This exercise, featured on the Specsavers website, involves holding a pen or pencil at arm’s length before focusing your gaze on it.
Named ‘Convergence to a Pen’, the next step of this exercise requires you to slowly move the pen towards your nose, ensuring that it remains clear in your vision.
Practised regularly, this exercise aims to strengthen your eye muscles and improve your focus.
Visit the Specsavers website to see the full exercise.
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Focus Shifting
Focus shifting helps to train your eye muscles to focus, strengthening them and helping to prevent eye strain.
This exercise involves holding your thumb out in front of you, at arm’s length, and slowly moving it from side to side whilst you follow it with your gaze.
Take a look at the Healthline website to read the exercise in full.
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Eye Yoga Exercise: Fast Blinking
Another eye yoga exercise to try is fast blinking.
For 10 seconds, blink as fast as you can and then hold your eyes closed for a few seconds. This exercise can help to cleanse the surface of your eye and get rid of debris.
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Eye Yoga Exercise: Switching Directions
The next step in your eye yoga routine is to close your eyes and move them in different directions.
Moving your eyes to the left, right, and then up and down can help to strengthen the muscles behind your eyes. It’s also been suggested that this exercise can help to boost short-term memory.
For visual tutorials of the above two exercises, watch this video.
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Near-to-Distant Viewing
This exercise helps to train your eyes in shifting from close-up to distant vision.
After finding two points of focus (one close to you and one further away), use two breathing cycles to focus on one object before moving on to the next one. Try this for ten cycles each time.
For an in-depth tutorial, take a look at this article by Harpers Bazaar.
Don’t forget to give your eyes rest in between exercises. You can also find a few different variations of the above exercises online; take a look at this article by Vogue, for example.
Try incorporating meditative practises into your eye yoga exercises, too. There are plenty of opportunities to slow down your breath, breathe from the diaphragm and increase your awareness of it as you try new exercises. For example, during the convergence exercise, try breathing in as you move the pen closer to your nose, and then breathing out as you move it away.
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