Whether eye exercises are effective

Good eyesight is one of the most precious gifts presented by the God to human beings. And people living in the world all know clearly that this gift can hardly last for a lifetime. What a pity that millions of people have lost clear vision at a pretty young age. Remedies to vision problems like myopia now include prescription eyewear and eye surgeries. Yet there is still a third approach to vision correction, i.e. doing eye exercises. Today, there are still controversies over the effectiveness of doing eye exercises.

Visual refractive errors may be caused by weak eye muscles

Some people have probably heard of some sayings of this vision improvement method. For example, some reasons for visual refractive errors are familiar, including “you are not using your muscles” and “your eye muscles became weak”. These are main ideas in the mind of the proponents of eye exercise. They believe that these sayings actually represent the causes of nearsightedness or farsightedness. In this sense, doing eye exercises will help the eye muscles work in a normal way.

Doing eye exercises helps improve eye muscle functionality

It is basically true that eye exercises involve the rotation of eyeballs. Some exercises rotate the eyes clockwise while some others counterclockwise. From a natural perspective, doing these exercises does keep the eye muscles moving and cause them to stretch and contract. This seems help keep these muscles work and function. One thought is also acceptable that eye exercises are aimed to accommodate the shape of the eyeball.

An opposite explanation of visual refractive errors

However, there is also an opposite argument about the effectiveness of eye exercises. Eye doctors claiming an opposite theory believe that those refractive errors are actually caused by an opposite condition when a certain group of extraocular muscles became too tense and this tension became chronic. When it comes to nearsightedness, the eyeball is forced by chronic tension to become elongated. In contrast, hyperopia or farsightedness involves too short eyeballs. And people with normal vision just have normal, round eyeballs. Well, this theory also sounds right.

Myopic or hyperopic eyes do not need strengthening any longer

Based on the latter argument, these eye muscles in people with a refractive error have been much stronger than needed because of the excessive tension. The saying of weak eye muscles is then thought to be wholly unfounded. The right way to offset the anomaly of refraction is to ease or alleviate this eye tension. To be honest, this is very difficult to master. Eye professionals sometimes suggest mental control as a possible means.