In 1969 when Joseph Kennebec wrote the book ‘Why Eyeglasses Are Harmful For Children And Young People’ only 10% of us were myopic.
Kennebec wrote: Up to twenty-five years ago only a few in every thousand children and young people were myopic. Today it is over ten in one hundred, and getting worse every year. It will go to fifty or more per hundred, if something is not done about it.
Well nothing was done about it and today about 41% of us are now nearsighted. That’s 127 million people who need glasses to see clearly.
For the past 49 years, the Chinese Education Ministry has required students to exercise their eyes to combat short-sightedness. Some of the simple eye exercises Chinese children are doing are:
Move eyeballs as far as possible to the right, to the left, down and up;
roll eyeballs clockwise and counter-clockwise;
close eyes and reopen them really hard.
So how has the Chinese eye exercise program been working out? In some Chinese cities as many as 90% of school children are nearsighted – a myopia explosion. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with encouraging children to play outside and do some ‘eyeroll’ or ‘up and down’ eye stretches, but it will not improve anyone’s vision. Little Johnny will still need to go buy a pair of glasses to be able to see the blackboard.
It’s almost impossible to improve your vision with eye exercises but it can be done.
Whenever someone mentions ‘eye exercises’ the first thing we think about is Wm Bates and his book, ‘Perfect Sight Without Glasses’ written in 1920. Bates is the planet’s KING of eye exercises and the biggest reason almost no one is ever able to improve their eyesight with eye exercises. The Bates Method doesn’t work. It’s not bad. But it just doesn’t work. That’s why 127 million Americans wear glasses. Everyone I know who has tried the Bates method was unsuccessful.
Bates believed nearly all vision problems were caused by habitual strain of the eyes. His book is more about relaxation techniques than active eye exercises.
Some of Bates’ relaxation techniques include:
memory – remembering an object as being more black, for example.
imagination
central fixation – seeing best where you’re looking
shifting and swinging – looking back and forth between objects
palming – covering both eyes with your plams for a few minutes then opening them.
The Bates method is like taking your eyes for a short walk in the forest with the birds singing. There’s nothing wrong with it and it might even help your mental attitude, but if you really want to improve your eyesight you should run your eyes through the forest, up hill, with a ten lb. weight in your backpack for an hour every day for three months. Then you will see amazing improvements. You need some eye exercises that force your eyes to WORK, not just imagine or remember or blink or relax. Your eyes need to Work.
Most eye doctors will say you can not improve your eyesight with simple eye exercises. It’s not true. I did improve my eyesight by doing eye exercises one hour a day, and even two hours some days. I’m not talking about the Bates method, which does not work. The eye exercises I did were done by looking at one letter, in a book palm.reading lines, at the farthest distance I could see it clearly, then moving the book one inch further away, and back, and away, over and over while trying to focus on that one clear black letter until I could FEEL me eye muscles getting the biggest workout they ever had in their life.
But I can’t explain everything in the short space of this article. There’s more to it. You have to be aware of when your eyes FOCUS IN on that letter and when you move the book further away, you notice you can see the letter more and more clear at greater distances, and you begin to invent some of your own eye exercises. And I continued the eye exercises for a week without wearing my glasses at all, and without looking at a computer screen. I concentrated on my eye exercise plan 24 hours/day. And I started looking at things in the distance more, and actually seeing them clearer than I ever did before. I even started eating properly, and doing physical exercise. When I went downtown I could read the names on the street signs so clear, it almost shocked me.
But people can’t do what I did. They need their glasses to go to work. It’s almost impossible for people to improve their vision by doing eye exercises, because the eye exercises they do are simple stretching, which doesn’t help much, and because the people don’t know where to start. And even if I had more time and space to explain the whole program right here in this article, most people would quit before they saw any results, or right after they saw results and go back to their old habits. Staring at a computer is one of the best ways I know to become more nearsighted.
But the biggest reason it’s almost impossible to improve your eyesight with eye exercises is no one believes it’s possible. I know it is possible. I’ve done it. I just don’t know if I can convince anyone else to believe it.