Did you know you can exercise your eyes as well?

As a physiotherapist we tell people to exercise, jog, run, gym, and swim but I rarely see those telling patients to exercise eyes.  Vision is one of our most treasured senses and we simply take  it for granted. We don’t need gym, ground or huge room to exercise eyes. It hardly takes 15-20 mins a day and can be done at ease, anytime and at any place.

Just like rest of your body your eyes needs to be stretched, exercised especially when you read or use computers – the two culprits  affecting our eyes. Strained eyes leads to headaches, neck pains etc so why to invite more trouble when the solution is few minutes away.

There will be hundreds of exercises you will find on Internet but i am sure we would hardly do them all. To make your life easier i have picked up best and easiest exercises  (two words we love the most ) and have sum up them for you below.

Palming the Eyes: Rub your hands together till they feel warm. Now place cupped palms on the eyes without pressing the eyeball. The palms should be cupped in such a way that there should be complete darkness when you place them on your eyes ,i.e no gaps between the fingers. Once you feel complete darkness remove hands and rub them again. Repeat palming thrice atleast. No restriction to it. Can be done as many times as you can.

Blinking of the Eyes: Mind it , its not winking. All you have to do it, is just alternate eye opening and closing for 3-5 secs and repeat atleast 7-8 times. Again as i mentioned before...no restrictions!!

Eye movements: Rotate eyes in clock and anti clock direction. Look from left to right too but keep blinking in between to rest your eyes. Please remember not to rotate neck when you do these. Can do this 7-8 times.

Focusing: Focus is very important to us in all aspects, here too. All you got to do is, fix your gaze :) . first pick a far objects and for second keep looking at it then fix your gaze to a nearer object and again keep looking at it for few seconds. Do this 5 times.

One thing we can't live without is Water.. keep splashing your eyes with cold water when possible between work. This is a must if you are a computer user.

There are tonnes of exercise and tips i can give you, example massaging your eyes, holding a pencil in your hand and moving it towards your nose ..... but i truly believe that people cant do it in office area plus too many exercise confuses you. So even if we do these 4-5 exercise i think we made it!! Healthy Eyes..