Eyes for the Win
I’ve posted before on the importance of training the eyes and keeping them healthy. But I was reminded this past week of just how powerful eye health can be for overall well-being!
I have been working with a client recently on overall body strengthening and mobility. Though I often incorporate vision work with clients, I had not yet done so with her, as she was experiencing good strength gains and progressing easily. Two weeks ago, she woke up in pain with a significant knot of tissue between her scapula and spine on one side. We had another session after she had been in pain for a week, and tried some gentle, restorative movement and breathing. She experienced temporary relief the next day, but the pain resumed and became debilitating for another week. When I saw her for our most recent weekly session, she was exhausted from the pain, and didn’t know what else to try.
Given that our eyes are at the top of the neural hierarchy, and our brains consider them to be critical to our health and survival, working with the eyes has the potential to create huge changes in our movement and pain. So, I started with a simple pencil push-up, having her stare at the tip of a pen as she brought the pen into the bridge of her nose. At some point, about 6” away, her left eye diverged, ceasing to look at the pen, while her right eye maintained focus. Seeing this, I had her repeat the exercise with her right eye covered, forcing the left eye to do the work, and it was interesting to watch how her left eye kept wanting to jump away and struggled to maintain its position. After some single eye work, she went back to both eyes, stopping the pen movement at a point where she “saw double” and trained the left eye to reacquire the target when it jumped away.
She spends a lot of time in front of multiple computer screens, so I also wanted to look at lateral eye movement. Her left eye had difficulties when the pen was to the left or right of her nose, and in particular, keeping the eyes focused on the target placed to the left was challenging, with her eyes wanting to jump away repeatedly.
After both of these exercises, she experienced a significant improvement in her head/neck range of motion, so I was hopeful that this might be the change her brain needed to break the pain cycle. And it was! The next day she felt almost back to normal, and that trend has continued. This experience just reaffirmed for me how important it is to consider the eyes when working with clients or patients!
How do you train your eyes? Let me know!