William Bates was a physician from New York who created a method to improve vision through eye exercises, visualization and relaxation techniques. This method has been and is at the center of many debates between those who claim that the method has no effect and those who have experienced improvements, slight or moderate (Tiwari et al, Int J Yoga, 2018 - Gopinathan et al, Ayu, 2012). What is certain is that perhaps with the Bates exercises you will never take off your glasses but surely you will be able to strengthen your eyes making them less lazy and counteracting tensions, tiredness and redness of the eyes. And in any case, there is nothing to lose by trying! In previous articles we talked about two very famous exercises, palming, the relaxation technique in which you should cup your hands on the eyes and imagine a moving scene, and the sunning, that is the exposure of closed eyes to sunlight. Today we will see two other exercises that aim to improve vision, the shifting and the technique of objects that move away. The first exercise is designed for a shortsighted eye while the second is general and is good for every eyesight defect. Let's see better!
Objects that move away
The myopic eye cannot adjust the focus on objects placed at distances greater than a few meters. The focus is on nearby objects and this creates a tension. To remove this tension and improve vision in general it can be helpful to look at objects at different distances. When you are at work or at home, try to have a break for a few seconds and first have a look at a nearby object, which you see well, and then at an object at a distance of three or six meters. Alternatively, you can touch your nose with your finger, then, by extend slowly your arm move your finger away and observe it. This exercise should be repeated about 30 times each day. Take off your glasses every time you practice it, it can help you increase the focus ability of your eyes.
Shifting
An exercise that adapts to any vision problem is shifting. It consists of shifting your eyes from one point to another. Healthy eyes are in fact in constant motion while any visual defect limits their mobility making them more fixed. So, a good way to make the eyes mobile but at the same time relaxed is the technique of shifting. Try to take an optometric table, you can download it from the internet, but the first page of a book is also fine, as long as the title is printed large and clear, or you can focus on two windows of a building, the distance depends on your type of visual defect. Choose two letters on the same line, or two windows in the case of the building, which will be blurred at first, and pass the look from one letter to another. Keep on doing this until the letters are blacker and more precise. But as the sight improves, another fact will also occur, while the eyes shift from one letter to the next the letters seem to move in the opposite direction. This same exercise can also be performed with two tables placed at different distances, choose a letter, the same one in both tables, and look from one to the other.
