Eye Muscle Training For Your Neck Tightness

Did you know that training your eye muscles can fix your neck and back tightness? Most people think that the main purpose of the eyes is to see and navigate through life. The fact is, the visual system is the most important system for survival. It is super complex and has many more functions such as playing a role in balance and reflexive spinal stability. 

So how do your eyes muscles have an impact on your neck muscles?

The visual system, the vestibular (inner ear, balance) system, and the proprioceptive (i.e., body movement, sensory, and muscle) system are neurologically connected.

When you look at something, signals get sent from the eye muscles to the balance organs in the inner ear. The brain integrates and interprets this information with other data (temperature, body parts in space, sound, etc) coming in. It then sends signals via the vestibulospinal tract to the muscles around the spine. The muscles needed to keep your neck and spine in the best position will be activated. All is good.

If your eye muscles are not functioning well enough, the initial signals are lacking quantity and quality. The brain has a harder time predicting how much to activate the muscles around the spine. Some muscles will be over-activated and you will experience neck or back tightness.

How to:

Use the picture and see if your eyes are working together in convergence. This trains the eye muscles that move your eyes inward to your nose.

Note: Make sure to only practice a few seconds at one time especially if you have eye weaknesses. You might get a headache if you overdo it. It is also an indication that working on your eyes might help you in a lot of ways.

1. Hold the picture 8-10 inches in front of your eyes.
2.  Cross your eyes and create a third circle in the middle. If you have a difficult time then take a pen and hold it close to the paper.
3. Keep your eyes on the pen and slowly move the pen towards your nose. Stop whenever you see the third ring in the middle.
   •   If you can’t get a third ring, then practice creating the middle ring first.
   •  If you see the third ring then try to line up and stack the words “seeing”. If you can’t stack the seeing then the top “seeing” indicates right eye weakness and the bottom “seeing” left eye weakness.
4.  Keep practicing every day for a 5-10 seconds.