Vision Therapy Exercises At Home

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

Vision therapy exercises at home are a crucial part of your optometric vision therapy treatment program.

Why Do I Need To Do Vision Therapy Exercises At Home?

You will experience more lasting and profound changes when in-office sessions are coupled with regular home practice and activities, as prescribed by your behavioral optometrist.

Patients are typically asked to do their eye exercises at home on the days they don’t come in for sessions. Optimum results are achieved with regular, short homework sessions coupled with in-office sessions. Patients who don’t do their homework tend to move through the vision therapy program more slowly and have fewer gains during the treatment period.

Your in-office sessions expose you to a controlled environment where you perform a specific action several times in a few minutes. Success with vision therapy takes homework and several, frequent visits to be effective.

Your progress will be monitored by the behavioral optometrist and vision therapist during your in-office sessions, and your individualized program may be adjusted based on the improvements you make.

Do I Need A Behavioral Optometrist To Prescribe Vision Therapy Exercises At Home?

Some people may think they can do vision therapy exercises on their own without ever seeing a behavioral optometrist or vision therapist.

You should definitely consult your behavioral optometrist prior to starting eye exercises at home to ensure that you are doing the right exercises for your needs. Your behavioral optometrist can use hundreds of exercises depending on your needs and your visual issues and skills.

As a word of caution, please take it slowly with any self-prescribed exercises because some exercises can cause exhaustion, headaches, irritability and nausea if done improperly. It is important to work your way up to longer spans of time gradually.

Also, your behavioral optometrist or vision therapist will make sure that you are doing the exercises properly. The exercises would be useless, otherwise.

You will likely make rapid improvement initially, and your performance will continue to improve when you follow up with home training sessions between in-office sessions. After an intense period of huge success and change, you are likely to experience a plateau where you will maintain your new visual skills. This is normal. Even if you think the homework is boring, keep doing your vision therapy homework. Just think of it as a lifestyle change.

By supporting your treatment program with vision therapy exercises at home, you can experience huge changes in your visual skills that last.

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