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Prep Assessments for Eye Exercises

So what we're gonna do this afternoon is we're going we've talked a lot about training so far we've talked about the consequences of poor vision, right segment one segment too we talked about benny brains, the fact that we can actually restructure our brains through deliberate practice through intentional well designed practice and that was really important to me to get across because as I said, if you don't realize that you're training your brain all the time, you are so whatever you're practicing and getting better at so in with that stuff in mind, what I want to start delving into is the actual testing of your vision and then starting off with some of the basic drills that we're going to spend most arresting afternoon on um and if you guys remember we talked about four different categories of visual skill we said you gotta have good visual clarity, so how well can I see it? I have to have the ability to have good eye movements so in other words can I track objects? Can I move my eye...

s smoothly? I have to have good depth perception so I need to be able to look at something and know where it is in relation, everything else and then finally I need to have good peripheral awareness I need to know are the question is how well can I see what I'm not looking at so what we're going to do is we start doing the assessments and drills were typically going to focus on on ly one aspect of those four skills like one scale at a four, but the thing to remember is that in general you can train all four at the same time in other words, if we're doing like earlier we were doing just this little exercise where were you tracking, right? We're doing movements well, could I actually as I'm moving that also be paying attention to my peripheral awareness that makes sense so there is going to be an ever evolving capacity to make these a little bit more challenging. Now, with that in mind, I want to start off with some of the basic rules though. All right, so safety first. This is where I always start all my classes. The goal here is improvement. The goal here is not to stress yourself out, okay, the sort to get through some of the basic rules always tell people you want to choose a safe training position. All right, so let me start off with this idea. Some people when they first start doing vision work, particularly if they have an inner ear deficit or have had some kind of brain trauma. Like I said, I work a lot of soldiers that have been blown up and other stuff they may get dizzy and so one of the things that you have to pay attention to is as you start doing the vision stuff if you feel weird or unstable stop sit down and very often what we find is that a vision drill that's really bothersome to you standing you can do just fine when you're lying down because the level of stress decreases so start off for most people if you're in relatively good health with no major issues, try the exercise of standing first, but if you have any concern whatsoever, start off sitting and then if anything goes badly wrong, you can try them lying down. That makes sense. So you pick a safe position next, be aware of your surroundings, don't this is like me talking to my kids. Stop running with scissors, right? Don't play with your eyes in an area where you might fall on something sharp. It's a really simple idea, right? Eh? So just make sure that your environment safe any syrian responses I mentioned this in the very beginning of the program remember, I'm not there with you, I'm not evaluating you. Your eyes are precious, your health is precious. If you have weird symptoms of any kind that come up, stop talk to your doctor, make sure this is appropriate for you um now I am going to say, though because of exactly what happened with you get a little bit of sweaty right? Because you were going through the first drill because vision is a integral part of your brain function when you begin trying to change it sometimes your brain says whoa, I'm not sure what's happening here so you kind of have to judge this for yourself you may have a little strange discomfort the main thing is we don't want it to be lasting all right? So if your eyes get a little blurry, well, we're doing that intentionally if you get a bit sweaty we're doing that and where you're training hard we don't want that to last for more than a couple minutes okay? If anything last more than, say three to five minutes probably time to call it a day and then rivas the exercise or talk to a professional last thing over here it says work hard and relax now those are not mutually exclusive. One of the things we know about elite level performers in all sports is that they are masters of balancing tension and relaxation if you think about you guys like sports uh what's your favorite sport toe watch yeah, sure football basketball can give me a favorite player oh man alexander on the seahawks back in two thousand was a while ago how and who else baseball and each row each year oh, awesome, okay you know, I don't watch sports, okay? When I was a kid, you know, saw about michael jordan? Absolutely. Yeah. So we got these iconic figures in comic athletes when you think about it, I an iconic athlete in motion doing their thing remember, we don't want the joke always make is we think about michael jordan. We don't picture his face on the wheaties box. What do we picture and jumping him? Jump right. This is like the nineties, the nineties symbol, right? So we think about them in motion and what what is a great athlete look like? Like when they're doing stuff, they make it look smooth, smooth, coordinated. I just say great athletes make it look effortless, right? Is it really effortless? No it's, actually incredibly hard, but their movement is so clean and so well balanced between hard work and relaxation that they make it look really effortless. So all of our training programs actually say that's a skill which means you wantto practice it intentionally. So as we're going through and we're doing these I evaluations were doing eye exercises. The goal is to push yourself like you got to push yourself into the borders of what's comfortable, but at the same time you want to maintain an energy internal awareness of am I starting to do this all right, I'll talk a little bit about what's called a startle reflex tomorrow, but the whole idea is that when you feel your body trying to get small and tight in the middle of an exercise, you probably pushing too hard that would follow that okay? So just really, really good mindset because we want to make sure that you're working hard but you're also working hard at making it effortless that's one of the jokes I always make when I'm talking to trainers and people that workout in gyms have you ever watched a guy in a gym who's obviously moving something that should be really easy for him and he's got the face like he's going to die he was doing a forty five pound bench pressing the and the question I always ask them is how do you ever expect it to look easy when you always practice making it look hard, right? So if an elite athlete performs at a high level and they practice making things look easy, we want to emulate that same process so we're doing my exercises keep that in mind cool any questions about any of that? No all right, so here we go finally the classes the glass, our glasses contact question always comes up so a couple different things we want to cover now if you are basically blind without your glasses in your contacts I'm going to give you permission to two for the first couple of weeks where them while you're getting used to the drills but ultimately you kind of have to decide is your goal to have a reduced reduction if possible in how much you used the glasses are in the prescription that your doctor has to give you if that's the case you gonna benefit from doing the exercises without the glasses on s o gently speaking it's better to not be linds all right if you is you're getting started with these but like I said, if it's blurry if it's too blurry to even see anything or you're feeling really uncomfortable being out of your glasses and for the first couple of weeks and do all of them with the glasses on and then start trying to progress out of it there's no super hard and fast rule that says, you know, seventeen days or fourteen days it's basically to tolerance ok, is that clear with everybody? The second question that came up I know from the internet was do I prefer contact lenses or glasses? I'm gonna ask you a simple question. What did I say is one of the issues that arises with glasses? Yeah, a little bit of a cage, right? Yeah decreases your field of vision and you don't want to look past where you can see clearly so for most of my athletes that I work with if they tolerate contact lenses, our firm there's several different optometry is that we work with I'll refer him to the optometrist to see if they can be if they khun use contact lenses again that is totally up to you that's a discussion between you and your your eyecare professional but in general in terms of how it impacts movement and kind of freedom of eye movement what we've found over the years is that contact lenses seemed to be a little bit better, right? So that's ah just our experience next question I almost always get is all right I'm starting these eye exercises give it a shot how much do I have to do it? This is where designing your own personalized program is going to be so important because it is possible to spend hours a day doing eye exercises. How do I know that? Because you're already doing eye exercises hours a day right? It's called your job so you our practice you're doing I work vision exercises all day. The question is how much do you have to do other than that to counter act how much you're practicing so our base level rule for most people is ten to twenty minutes a day now that does not have to be in one burst and in fact if you guys remember the ten commandments of bendy brain one of those said that repetition matters in time matters what we're learning the more we study the brain is that small bite size chunks of reminders throughout the day are often better than one big bite makes sense so what I also won't have people do is if your goal is twenty minutes I may have them do two to three minutes seven, eight times a day and that one actually is easier to schedule into your day right on every break when you get up from the computer take two minutes do your vision drills um the reason for that is that we remember we're trying to transition a thought or an idea into a structure and the mohr often we remind the brain of what we want to have happen the more quickly the brain structure starts to change or develop okay? So that's kind of a baseline now are the people that need more than this? Yes are the people that need less in this? Yes, your base level goal is going to be as I said, especially if you have some significant visual issues start thinking about the twenty minutes a day you test that and that's the whole of the goal of the health you're always testing if twenty minutes makes a difference for you that's noticeable within two to four weeks with testing your golden if it's insufficient maybe have to add a little bit more but ultimately, it will always come back to testing that's the only way to know for sure if you're making progress in what kind of progress, let me give you a kind of a classic example. Um ah, two months ago in our office, we decided to run a contest, we put some money behind it just to see what would happen, and it was actually a vision training contest for all of our staff because we have we have all kind of ages on staff, and we ran this vision jim contest, and it was really interesting because, um, a couple people that actually wanted winning some money didn't realize that they had made visual progress, they've been doing their exercises, but on the day that I came back to test them, uh, they were like, oh, I don't know, I don't think I've made any any improvement, and it was fascinating because one of them actually had twenty forty vision in one eye, and on the day we tested, I think was down the other twenty, twenty or twenty fifteen, but didn't know it because why? Because we live with our eyes all the time. And so your experience here, you know, you're experiencing your vision all day, every day, and so this even a large change like that may be may be less evident than you think and unless you actually do some testing so as part of this, you know, given you guys these these tools to use and you want to make sure that there are regular part of your week, I usually suggest testing or reassessing your eyes at least once a week you could do it more often, but that would be kind of a minimum to make sure that you're making progress. Okay, no questions that's pretty good for so let's say you do these type of drills and get yourself in the habit of doing that periodically throughout your day and you don't notice your vision getting better, but you wear the same strength of corrective lenses that have any adverse side effects regarding, you know, giving you headaches or it being over corrective interesting so that's a great question, and there is that potential so one of the things that I would recommend if you're starting down this kind of vision training path, it is it's, as I said, it's an experiment of one, so if you're doing the exercises and you start to develop either difficulty with your glasses or muscle tension whatever, then go back to optometry because the high likelihood is that you need a less strong prescription one of our trainers it's funny because last about six months ago he came into a course and he walked up and he put some prescription pads papers on my desk and like, what are these things like these air my prescription dropping every three months so he had actually gone in and hey brought the prescription for his new glasses to me on for every three months it had reduced since he started with the drill so you may run into that, so just be aware of that. Okay? Any other questions on glasses? No glasses. How often? How much? All right, I'm going to talk about another little concept here and this one again, this relates back to some of the stuff I discussed this morning. So in in the medical field, the training field, one of the things that we're trying to get really intelligent about is dozing all right? And that's what? Getting one of the reasons we have to do all this assessment stuff. So let me ask you if you you know, if you take over the counter pain medication let's see you take advil for a headache. Do you know what that average what? Two typical dosage of like what's on the bottle, how much advil you're supposed to take wanted to every like eight hours or so close yet so the general dosage especially for ah, an adult male, because most of dosages on medicine is for one hundred fifty pound person, but the typical dose would be two tablets. Do you know how much that is? Each one is two hundred milligrams sodium. Four hundred milligrams of advil every probably six hours, four to six hours would be typical. Now you may go if you've ever had surgery or something been given two, eight hundred milligrams, right? But what you almost never get is someone going. You know what? Take that two hundred and cut it into tents. All right, just take twenty milligrams. Why? Because the likelihood have been doing anything is pretty low. It's an insufficient amount right of the dose, but at the same time, you also don't get someone going take fifty of them. Why? Because what would happen to you then? Overdose, right, you might die. So the issue about medicine, about anything, about anything that we do the body is we have to find the appropriate dose.