Resting & Training Your Eyes
This video introduces two very simple drills, Palming and Sunning, that may help keep your eyes relaxed and improve your vision.
0:00 - Hello out there. It's Shane from MATRIX. In today's video, I'm going to show you two very simple drills that you can use for your eyes to help keep them relaxed, and maybe even improve your vision.
0:13 - I think we can all agree that our eyes are very important. When we're having trouble seeing, life is much more difficult. And like any other part of our body that we want to work optimally, our eyes need to be trained, and they should also get some time to rest. So that's why I'm going to show you these two drills today that help you do exactly that.
0:29 - The first drill I'm going to teach you is called palming. This is a drill for relaxation. If you're like most of us, and you're on your device, or you're a TV watcher, or you're sitting at your computer desk all day, you're constantly looking very close in and straining your eyes with a lot of blue light. So, we want to give your eyes a break. This is something you can do every so often throughout the day, as well as when you first wake up, or right before you go to bed.
0:52 - The way we do palming is we first warm up our hands simply by rubbing them together. Once we've done that, we close the eyes. Place the palms over top of the eyes so that your eyes are resting in the little gap in the center of your palm. The rest of your hand is placed around the bones of the face, so there is no direct pressure on the eye itself. While your eyes are covered, you're going to keep your eyes closed, you're going to rest, and you're going to breathe deeply. Now, you want to do this for at least 45 seconds to a minute. But once or twice a day, it's really powerful, if you do this for at least five minutes. While you have your eyes covered, you might find that you're seeing a bunch of light clouds or ghostly images. Over time, as you're keeping the eyes covered, you eventually want those to dissipate until you're seeing complete blackness. At that point, the eyes are finally beginning to relax because those images were coming from an optic nerve that was still firing. So that's drill one, it's called palming, and it is for relaxation.
1:53 - Drill number two is called sunning. Now ideally, you get a chance to go outside for this drill. You don't want to look directly at the sun, but you're going to face the sun and keep your eyes closed. Once you're doing that, you're just going to turn your head from side to side, while aiming your eyes at the sun. While you're doing this, what you should see is that when you're rotating into the sun, it will get very bright behind your eyelids. And as you rotate to the side, it will start to get darker. The more time you spend doing this, you'll start to see very distinct darkness and very distinct bright spots. This means that your eyes are now starting to get the benefit because you're getting that distinction between the two. Now for this drill, think about doing it for 30 seconds to a minute, and for no more than about five minutes. This drill is great if you can do it a couple times a day, so that you can really begin training your eyes to function better.
2:51 - Now here's the benefit specifically for each of these drills. With sunning, where you're turning the head, what you're teaching your eyes to do is allowing pupils to contract and relax. This is working the intraoccular muscles. And it's actually a strength training drill for those muscles. When our pupil can contract more quickly. It allows us to focus on images more easily by changing the amount of light that we're letting in to the eye. Secondly, working these muscles also allows us to work the muscles that shape the lens. By shaping the lens of the eye, we're able to see both near and at far distances. Training the eye this way, you might actually be able to improve your vision.
3:36 - The palming drill, as I mentioned, is our relaxation drill. And by letting your eyes rest, it gives them an opportunity to function better. So again, if you're staring at a screen all day and your eyes are getting tired and stressed out. You'll notice by the end of the day that you're not seeing as clearly. By doing palming throughout the day, you'll help reduce some of that eye strain. You'll be feeling better by the end of the day in your body, but you'll also be able to see better as well.
3:59 - Now if you really want to try this at home, what I recommend doing is clicking on the link below so you can download one of our vision training cards. On this card, we have a whole bunch of different fonts, of all different sizes, with little sayings. What you would do is hold this card at an arm's distance away from your nose and find the smallest font that you can read. After reading the font, go ahead and do one of these two drills from a minute to up to five minutes. When you're done, look at the card again. You might notice that you're actually able to read the same line you were on more clearly, or maybe even lower lines. I see it all the time with my clients. We may have started at a line of font point 9 and by the end of the session we're working down at a seven or six. It's really powerful. It's really cool. And it does show that there's hope for changing your vision.
4:46 - So I hope that you enjoyed this video today. Please try these drills at home. Download the card so you can see your vision actually improve. And if you have any more questions about other things you could be doing to improve your vision or improve your body please don't hesitate to reach out.