After reading “Improve your Vision Without Glasses or Contact Lenses”, I learned that there are slightly different techniques and exercises to use in order to treat different eyesight conditions. With that in mind, I thought it would be helpful to condense here the specific parts of eyesight improvement which are helpful for myopic / near-sighted / short-sighted people like me, to help come with a strategy or plan of action for how to go about improving your eyesight naturally.

So in brief, here is my strategy for treating my myopia:

Step 1: Before doing Eye Improvement exercises, first relieve any eye strain

Eye strain can slow down progress or can even reverse progress, so it’s important that if your eyes feel tired, to practice some eye-strain relieving techniques. This applies both before starting the vision-improvement exercises and DURING the process of working on your eyes. Always check in to make sure you eyes are feeling good, and if they feel tired, take note and give them a break, treating your eyes to some soothing techniques like:

• Reduce eye-strain inducing close-focus work and take regular eye breaks during near-work (eg. computer work, reading etc)
• Palming (for 7-10 minutes at a time)
• Light therapy or sunning (for 7-10 minutes at a time)
• Hydrotherapy (for 5 minutes or so)
• Acupressure (for 5 minutes or so)

(Click on the technique name to see an explanation of what it is.)

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Step 2: Take regular breaks from near work

During computer work, reading, tv watching, sewing, knitting, eating.. anything that requires you to look at things that are near you rather than far away, take regular eye-breaks. Close-up-work strains eyes if done for long durations without a break.

How often should you take a break? Recommendations vary. I’ve seen all of the following suggestions:

• Couple minutes break every 30-40 minutes of near-work.
• 10-10-10 rule: 10 second break from close work every 10 minutes, looking to a distance of 10 feet away.
• 20-20-20 rule: 20 second break from close work every 20 minutes, looking to a distance of 20 feet away.

How to take eye breaks:

• Looking away at distant objects for 2-20 seconds at a time, to give your eyes a break from the up-close vision.
• Use an eye-relaxing exercise like palming, an eye acupressure break, or the Slow Blink technique (Click on the technique name to see an explanation of what it is.)

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Step 3: Pay attention to the tilt of my head

This isn’t for myopia but rather for treating astigmatism. I have some minor astigmatism, and according to the book, astigmatism can be caused by a tendency to constantly tilt your head in a certain way rather than keeping it upright. I’ve noticed that I indeed do tilt my head slightly to one side quite often so I intend to become more conscious of this and keep my head upright as much as possible to undo my astigmatism.

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Step 4: Only wear glasses when you REALLY need them, and when wearing them, keep your maximum possible distance from things and only wear glasses that give the minimum amount of correction needed for your particular activity. Leave glasses off at all other times

Due to blissful ignorance, I’ve been guilty of exacerbating my eyesight by just leaving my glasses on all the time. It was easier than continually taking them off and putting them on as I look around at different distances. The thing is, I’d been keeping them on even when I was doing hours of near-work; during reading, during writing, during eating… and didn’t really need them for these activities. It just didn’t cross my mind to question whether I really needed them for close-work, it was just easy to forget they were even on. What happens if you use glasses intended for seeing far away, for near-work? You’re effectively forcing your eyes to look through “distant” setting, for close-up work, and if you do it for a very long time, your eyes adapt to make sure you can see well WITH your distant-setting glasses for close-up distances. Then when you look far away with the same glasses, surprise surprise, the glasses have adapted for closer-distances and now you can’t see as well with them for far-away distances. You go to the optician, they say, yep, you can’t see well for far distances. Here’s a higher prescription for you to solve the problem. But it doesn’t solve the problem. As long as you continue leaving your glasses on when you don’t need them, the cycle will repeat, leading to progressively higher prescriptions.

To break the cycle, become aware of when you don’t need your glasses and take them off. Make your eyes work naturally for distances that don’t need glasses, and only use glasses that have the strength needed for your specific purpose (e.g. glasses for computer work or reading distance should be a different strength from glasses needed for driving). In doing this, using the weakest possible prescription for each activity and not settling for a one high “one-prescription-fits-all”, your natural eyesight will strengthen, or at the very least, stabilize.

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Step 5: Purchase undercorrected glasses

In my case, since my prescription is over -4.00D, rather than going cold turkey with no glasses, I think it’s best for me to use undercorrected glasses to gradually adapt to seeing better.

How do you know which prescription to get? In the book they recommend the following:

• 0.50 D lower for distant sight
  (although some other people recommend a gentler 0.25 D undercorrection)
  The weaker prescription should give you 20/40 acuity in each eye (this means that you can see at 20 feet what a normal person sees at 40 feet.)
• 2.00 D lower for near sight that requires glasses eg. reading, computer work etc.

As I understand it, the idea is to let your eyes adapt to a lower prescription, and train your eyes to improve using eye exercises, and once your eyes see well with the undercorrected prescription, you and get a new pair of glasses with another 0.25 – 0.50 step down in prescription, to adapt to that, gradually improving your eyesight.

I have already used the website selectspecs.com to order some cheap glasses to use for this progressive undercorrection process. For the start of my journey I’ve currently bought 3 sets of glasses, all without astigmatism. In case you’re curious, the glasses I bought were with the following prescriptions:
- Starting point before undercorrection:  R 4.25    L 4.75  with astigmatism
- Undercorrective lenses 1:                          R 4.00    L 4.25 without astigmatism
- Undercorrective lenses 2:                         R 3.75     L 3.75  (going for parity)
- Undercorrective lenses 3:                         R 3.50     L 3.50

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Step 6: Do the recommended eye improvement exercises

The exercises I plan to do are a selection of those that were recommended in the book for myopia, as well as maybe some I resonate with that I find online. I haven’t yet picked the ones I will do but it will be a selection of some of the following exercises and practices:
(I starred and made bold the ones I liked the sound of the most)

• ✮ Print Pushing – 2-4 hours a day
• Hydrotherapy – at least 3 mins a day
• Fast Blinking – 1 minute per day
• ✮Slow Blinking – 1 minute a day
• Squeeze blinking – 1 minute a day
• ✮Pumping – at least 3 minutes at a time, 2 times a day
• Eye rolls – 1 minute a day
• Clock rotations – 1 minute a day
• Light therapy – 5 minutes a day
• ✮Acupressure exercises A B and C, 2 mins each a day
• Palming 5 minutes a day
• Acuity chart exercise 2 minutes a day
  edit: This is effectively Push Printing, only instead of working with text on the screen or in a book it works with a chart like the Snellen chart, like this one: Acuity Chart. See Push Printing for the article on how to do this technique.
• Scanning chart 2 minutes a day: This is like one of those eye maze games they often give children, where you have to follow a line with your eyes from one end of the “maze” to another. Here is an example Scanning Chart I found online to follow: Scanning Chart. I think the purpose of this chart is to both train your eye muscles and give them a wowrout, and to help you strengthen your focusing technique since it’s a challenge for the eye to keep focus on the one line you are following.
• Edge Tracking (aka Blur zoning) 2 minutes a day
• Fusion pumping 3 minutes, three times a day
• Candle power technique

(Click on the technique name to see an explanation of what it is.)

These can be categorized:
- Eye muscles relaxation techniques: palming, slow blink, hydrotherapy, sunning, acupressure
- Eye moistening techniques to prevent dry eyes: fast blink, slow blink, squeeze blinking
- Extraocular Eye muscle exercises – for peripheral vision i think: eye roll, clock rotations
- Focus-work exercises: pumping, acuity chart exercise, scanning chart exercise, blur zoning, edge tracking, fusion pumping

NB The EndMyopia technique by Alex Frauenfeld of endmyopia.org suggests for the first 45 days to work on close-up focus (the thing that caused myopia in the first place) before starting to work on fixing distant focus.

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Step 7: Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) emotional aids
In TCM, it is said that “the Liver opens into the eyes”, so the TCM Liver’s health can affect eye health. The TCM Liver is not quite the same as our Western thought of what a liver is, and in TCM, each TCM organ has certain emotions linked to it which strongly affect the health of that organ. The emotions linked with the Liver are:

• Frustration
• Anger
• Irritability
• Moodiness
• Bitterness
• Resentment
• Stress

So according to TCM, it may be possible that if we strive to tune in to our moods, and soothe ourselves towards feeling peaceful, calm, stable and relaxed whenever we’re feeling any of the unbalanced Liver emotions, it will soothe the TCM Liver, so that when the “Liver opens into the eyes”, it may help improve our eyesight.

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Another aspect of TCM is that the TCM Kidney holds the “essence of life” (which they call “Jing”) that helps nourish everything in our body, including the eyes. The emotion that weakens the TCM Kidneys is mostly fear. So soothing the Kidney by soothing away fears may also be helpful for nourishing the eyes to help gain better eyesight.

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Anecdotal story: My father is the most calm, quiet, peaceful and laid back person I know. He rarely gets angry or worked up, even in very challenging situations, and I don’t remember ever seeing him showing signs of moodiness, bitterness, resentment or fear. Despite him doing near-sight work, and working on a computer all day every day for almost 30 years with “bad eye habits”, his eyesight has stayed stable and very good all his life; he’s now in his 60s. I wonder if his great eyesight despite bad eye habits has something to do with his unusually peaceful state of mind when it comes to the Liver and Kidney emotions.

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Step 8: Keep track of progress with measurements and journaling

Once a week, it is recommended to keep track of the following measurements to track your improvement. Here are some possible ways to track your progress. I’ve starred my favourite methods:

• Blur zone measurement: Measure the distance from the bridge of yoru nose to the point where an object becomes blurry. To measure this, it’s probably a good idea to always do the test in the same light conditions, in the same room, and in the same time of day (preferably early in the day when your eyes are fresh and well rested).  To measure your blur zone, take an object and push it away from you until it becomes blurry. The point at which it becomes blurry is your blur zone’s beginning. Use the same object each time you measure the blur zone to keep the measurements comparable.
• ✮Acuity chart test results: Each week use an acuity chart like this one when you’re at a set distance away from it (it’s important that this distance is constant every time you measure) and note down which line is the smallest one you can see. I plan to do this with the acuity chart on my computer screen which I will read without glasses (and with undercorrected glasses) and see what the furthest line I can read is.
• Record the journey: Journal general changes you observe in your eyesight; how you’re doing with the exercises, how long you spend without tye glasses each day; feelings relating to how your eyes are feeling etc.

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Disclaimer: Everything in this article is material the author has learned from books and online articles and is not a substitute for help from a qualified eyecare professional. Any exercises or recommendations described are applied at the risk and sole responsibility of the reader. The author takes no responsibility for any consequences arising from a reader practising anything recommended on this website.

Keeping your head still and moving only your eyes, look all the way to the left and then move your eyes slowly and smoothly in a clockwise fashion all around in a circular motion, keeping the eye looking to the sides, around, up and down to give your muscles a good stretch.

After doing it clockwise for 30 seconds to 1 minute, you can do it anti-clockwise for another 30 seconds to 1 minute.

In the book “Improve your Vision Without Glasses”, they suggest doing this exercise for about 1-2 minutes at a time.

Word of Caution:
Don’t overdo the eye-muscle stretch. A sign of overdoing it and causing stress to the eye is if you see flashes of light or if you feel any discomfort or pain.
If you’re prone to motion sickness or feel yourself getting dizzy from this exercise one possible way to try this exercise is underneath the cover of your hands, or underneath the cover of a dark cloth so that you don’t have to look around.

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What does this eye exercise do?

• Relaxes and “unwinds” the eye after it’s been in one position for a long time (say when reading or staring at a screen). The unwinding may help promote energy flow and circulation of oxygen and nutrients to the eye.
• Trains, stretches and strengthens the extraocular eye muscles. I think this may be helpful also for improving peripheral vision and overcoming problems of tunnel-vision.

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Disclaimer: Everything in this article is material the author has learned from books and online articles and is not a substitute for help from a qualified eyecare professional. Any exercises or recommendations described are applied at the risk and sole responsibility of the reader. The author takes no responsibility for any consequences arising from a reader practising anything recommended on this website.

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What is Push Printing?

Push Printing is a technique which you can apply every time you are reading print, be it on the computer or in a book. The idea is to push your eyes to read withing your readable-blur-zone, to train them to adapt and to push them into actively focusing to clear up your current blur zone.

Todd Becker likens this technique to weight-lifting for the eyes. At first the weights (=the increased distance demand you put on your eyes to read) feel a little uncomfortable to lift, but after some training, your muscles adapt and strengthen so that those weights feel easy to lift and you can move to heavier ones (or in eye terms, you can increase your distance from the screen even more as your eyes adapt to the previous distance and are ready for an increased blur distance to train with).

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How to do Print Pushing

Let’s look at the step-by-step method for this technique:

Depending on your starting-point eyesight, you can use this method either without glasses or with progressively lower prescriptions as you buy undercorrected glasses and train your eyes step by step, glasses by glasses (over the course of several weeks or months) to go down in prescription.

• Step 1: Find D1
  Find your “comfortable focus” distance (called D1) from the screen or book. You do this by seeing how far you need to be from the screen in order for the text to JUST be crisp and focused. Becker calls this the “edge of focus”.
• Step 2: Find D2
  Find where your “blur zone distance” (called D2) starts. This is the point where the text is still readable but a little less crisp and slightly more blurry. Becker calls this point the “edge of blur”.
• Step 3: Find D3
  Find the “unreadable distance” (called D3), which is the point at which the text is so blurry that you can no longer read it.
• Step 4: Do any near-work somewhere between D1 and D2:
  By reading on the computer or from a book at the distance where the text is readable but just a tad blurry, you are adding a small amount of stress which encourages the eye to actively learn to re-focus blurred text and adjust so that it can see crisply within this distance. The idea is that after training your eye for a while at this distance, the eye will eventually learn to focus at this distance, at which point your eyesight will have improved.
  Note: It’s very important not to push yourself too much. Stay in D1-D2 and don’t go beyond D2 because otherwise you just strain your eyes instead of training them. It’s like in the gym when you workout too hard and then your muscles need the right amount of weight-training, whereas too much heavy weight at once is too much for your muscles, is not good for your body and won’t see positive results. The right weights, working out the right way will get positive results.
  Since Push Printing can be a little strenuous for the eye, you may want to do it just for 2-4 hours a day, taking breaks every 15-30 minutes to let your eyes rest.
• Step 5: Keep note of your D1, D2 and D3 measurements to see improvement
  Over the weeks and months that you train your eyes, once a week or so, make a note of the D1, D2 and D3 distances that you are currently reading at. If you are challenging yourself and using the Push Printing technique effectively (alongside good eye habits of taking regular breaks, having good amounts of lighting, avoiding eye strain, eating healthily and covering all the other bases for good eye health), you should be seeing that the distance at which the text becomes blurry will gradually start to increase so that you can see more clearly now at your old blur zone.
• Step 6: When you reach a D1-D2 of 20 inches, graduate to plus lenses
  Becker suggests that in order to keep training your eyes, once you can see the screen without glasses at a distance of 20 inches away, use plus lenses to continue training them towards optimal eyesight without glasses.

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Other similar eyes exercises

There are a lot of similarities between Push Printing and the following exercises I’ve seen:

• Edge Tracking (aka Blur Zoning)
• The Acuity Chart Exercise in the book “Improve your Vision without glasses” which uses a specific chart to practice push printing on rather than just working with everyday text that’s around you.

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References:
- Todd Becker. 2010. Improve eyesight – and throw away your glasses.  gettingstronger.org
- Todd Becker. 2014. Myopia: A Modern Yet Reversible Disease. Ancestry Foundations. youtube video
- Alex Frauenfeld. 2013. How to: Finding Active Focus. endmyopia.org
- Alex Frauenfeld.  Is Print Pushing the Best Way to Improve Eyesight? endmyopia.org

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Disclaimer: Everything in this article is material the author has learned from books and online articles and is not a substitute for help from a qualified eyecare professional. Any exercises or recommendations described are applied at the risk and sole responsibility of the reader. The author takes no responsibility for any consequences arising from a reader practising anything recommended on this website.

I’ve read variations of this technique that are recommended by several eyesight-improving experts including Todd Becker on his site, gettingstronger.org and Alex Frauenfeld from the Frauenfeld Clinic and the website, endmyopia.org. Instead of calling it “pumping”, Alex calls this distant-focus-near-focus method “focus pulling” & “focus pushing” (or sometimes he calls it “pulling focus” & “pushing focus”), and I’ve seen others call it the “alternate focusing technique”, the “shifting focus technique” and the “re-focus exercise”.

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How to do the Pumping eye focusing exercise:

1.) Near focus:
Pick an object that’s near you at a distance of about 6 inches, or 15 cm away from you). It can be an object on your desk; it can be your hand, a piece of jewelry you have on – anything you have handy. Focus on this for 2 seconds, examining it in detail.

2.) Distant focus
Pick something that’s far away from you, at a distance that’s slightly blurry but that you can still kind of see. Examples of objects you can choose for distant focus may be an object or book on the shelf at the other end of the room, a tree branch outside the window, a road sign, the edge of a building or the numberplate of a car. Focus on this for 2 seconds, examining it in as much detail as you can.

3.) Alternate Near and Distant Focus
Every 2 seconds, change your eyes focus from near to distant object, essentially “pumping” near-far-near-far, between the objects.

The book recommends to do this eye exercise for about 3 minutes at a time, and you can do it several times a day to really give your eyes’ ciliary muscles a good workout.

Other experts don’t specify that you need to alternate 2-second focus intervals and don’t specify the exact time periods to dedicate to close-up vs distant focus. There is room to experiment with “pumping” at your own speed.

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Supplementary notes for this exercise:

The book didn’t specify whether to do this exercise with or without glasses, or what to do if you can’t see very far without glasses. Here’s my personal extrapolation for possible ways to do this exercise regarding whether you do it with or without glasses:

(i.) without glasses: Depending on your eyesight, the “distant” object that’s on the edge of your blur-zone may be still quite near to you (say 30cm or less away). That’s ok – Personalize this exercise to practice with your blur zone and hopefully over time your blur-zone distance will increase.

(ii.) with undercorrected glasses: Particularly for people starting the eye-healing process with stronger prescriptions, part of your vision therapy method probably involves using undercorrected glasses to gradually improve your eyes. You can use this Pumping exercise with undercorrected glasses to allow you to practice focusing on more distant objects whilst still challenging and training your eye a little through the slightly undercorrected lenses.

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How does this eye focusing exercise work?

The idea is that by alternating near and distant focus, it is like sending the ciliary muscles in your eyes to the gym to get stronger. (NB the ciliary muscles are the muscles in charge of eye focus.)

In eyesight jargon, the “Improve your Vision” book states that exercising the ciliary muscles in this way will “increase the accomodative amplitude, extend the nearpoint and farpoint, and change the refractive status of the lens”.

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Disclaimer: Everything in this article is material the author has learned from books and online articles and is not a substitute for help from a qualified eyecare professional. Any exercises or recommendations described are applied at the risk and sole responsibility of the reader. The author takes no responsibility for any consequences arising from a reader practising anything recommended on this website.

During the day, we put our eyes under strain by focusing on near things (e.g. during reading, writing, computer work, tv-watching, using phones, using ipads etc etc.) and palming is one way to give your eyes a little break from all the visual stimulation around, to give them a moment to recharge, refresh and therefore keeps them functioning optimally.

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How to do Eye Palming:

You can do palming either sitting down or lying down.

1. Close your eyes
2. Cup your eyes with your hands in a way that your palm’s heel rests on your cheekbones and the tips of your fingers cross lightly on your forehead. Be sure to keep the palms light on your eyes – you don’t want to put any pressure on the eyeballs at all. The aim is a gently relaxed posture where your eyes feel relaxed, your body feels relaxed and where no light enters the eyes.

Palming Posture tips: If you’re sitting, the most effective sitting posture for palming involves keeping your head upright (not leaning forward or back). Your hands are there to cover your eyes, not to support the weight of your head. As you palm, keep your neck and shoulders relaxed. If you’re palming for long durations (say over 5 minutes), you may want to lean your elbows on something soft like a couple of pillows or blankets whilst your palm to help you maintain the position in a relaxed, comfortable way.

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How long should I palm my eyes for?

There are no rules for how long a palming session should be. It depends on what feels good to you.

1-2 minutes is quick and still beneficial for a quickie eye-relaxation period. Some rest is better than no rest at all.

5 minutes is the recommended amount to do per day to help myopia in Beresford et al’s book for Improving your Vision.

15-30 minutes is done by some people who really love doing palming and enjoy it as a type of meditative exercise.

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How often should I palm my eyes?

You can palm your eyes anything from 1 time per day to 20 times a day.

The guide is how often you feel your eyes are tired, blurry, stinging, red and strained. A headache can also be a clue that palming may help. Whenever you feel any of these kinds of inklings of eye strain, that would be a good time to do some palming.

Alternatively, you can do palming even when your eyes feel good, just to give them a routine break to prevent eye strain from developing.

Tip!  An example of a time of day I’ve found is easy to fit palming into is… and excuse me in advance for it sounding a bit funny… when you’re sitting on the toilet! Instead of just staring into space, you can use the opportunity to palm for a minute or two!

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Things you can do alongside palming

You can make the most of your palming times by using the time as an opportunity to:

• Affirm: Focus on light, relaxed, encouraging, positive affirmations that help you feel good
• Meditate: focus on your breathing and take the opportunity to just clear your mind of stressful thoughts.
• Reiki: If you have Reiki, palming can serve a double purpose of infusing your eyes with healing Reiki energy as well as just relaxing them.

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Disclaimer: Everything in this article is material the author has learned from books and online articles and is not a substitute for help from a qualified eyecare professional. Any exercises or recommendations described are applied at the risk and sole responsibility of the reader. The author takes no responsibility for any consequences arising from a reader practising anything recommended on this website.