How to do this Edging Exercise:

1.) Choose an object that has a clearly defined edge (like the edge of a window, edge of a door, a dark tree branch or tree trunk against the sky, the edge of a building, a telephone pole etc). Without glasses (or with undercorrected glasses that you’re learning to focus with), make sure the object is far enough away from you to be slighty blurry but not extremely blurry. (In “Print Pushing” exercise terminology, we’re talking about being somewhere between D1 and D2). Be a distance where you can see the object’s lightly blurred edge.

2.) Ensuring your body is relaxed and your mind is calm, allow your eyes to slowly move along the edge of the object, edge-tracking its slightly blurry edges. The idea is to carefully study the slightly blurred object’s edges, whilst staying relaxed (and not squinting, straining or efforting too much). And the idea is that by training your eyes to do this, eventually edges at this distance will come into better focus.

It is recommended in the book, “Improve your Vision Without Glasses” to do this exercise for about 2 minute at a time.

3.) You can finish the exercise with doing a little palming or just closing your eyes for a bit, to help your eyes relax from the effort of the exercise.

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What this Edge Tracking exercise does:

It strikes me that this exercise sounds a lot like Push Printing, the only difference being that in Push Printing we’re focusing on text on the computer or in a book, and in this exercise you’re focusing on an object.

Both Push Printing and this eye exercise aim to sharpen the visual acuity (ie. the sharpness of the focussed image) by training you to focus within your current blur zone, with the aim of eventually clearing up focus in this zone.

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How this Edge Tracking Eye Focusing exercise works:

This exercise trains and strengthens your ciliary muscles in your eye.

By trying to focus on things that are a little blurry, you are training your ciliary muscle to learn to focus better and clear up images at this distance that had been little blurry. In more techniqcal jargon, in the book “Improve your Vision” they say that this method  exercises the ciliary muscle so that “they will increase their 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.

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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.