There are many speed readers out there who believe that a large part of their success comes from exercising their eyes, building up the muscles which allow them to scan through text quickly, see more of the words on the page with their peripheral vision, and therefore, go at a rapid pace through the text. Thus, the question they’re asking is how to exercise the eyes.
The most basic speed reading eye exercise is based on moving your eyes in a ‘Z’ or a backwards ‘S’ motion. Doing this, you can effectively read three lines at once, if you practice. The first time you go across the text, you’re reading both the first and second line, and when you come down the slanted part, you’re simply reminding yourself of what was there, and connecting the dots. As you read across the bottom of the ‘Z’, you are then reading the next one, or even two lines.
Obviously, this can have a tremendous impact on your reading speed because you’re doing two things at once. Learning how to read with an eye for information and still being able to read the author’s point in their work takes a great deal of practice, but for most, the hardest part is simply the first step. You’re so used to taking in one line at a time that as soon as you’re instructed to take in two lines worth of information, you have to do a double take – you simply can’t train your eyes to do that.
The first step, and the first eye exercise, then is to relax your eyes, and stare at a fixed point. Then try to take in all of the information around that point, making a mental picture of it without moving your eyes. What you’re doing is working on seeing through your peripheral vision, which athletes and sports stars use all the time, and which normal people rarely use. We tend to only see what we focus on, which is not utilizing all of our potential range of vision. Training ourselves to use our peripheral vision can effectively increase what we can see by more than 30%.
The second eye exercise is based on the idea of reading in a ‘Z’ pattern. If you really want to know how to exercise your eyes for the purposes of speed reading, then this is the number one way. The way you do this eye exercise is simply to softly focus your eyes like you did in the previous exercise, and then start sweeping your eyes back and forth, using a full range of motion, going as far to the left and right, and as far to the top and bottom of your visual range as you can. While you’ll never find a book that large, you don’t want to shortchange your muscles. Moving is a more fluid motion, the backwards ‘S’ allows you to do the same thing without the harsh turnarounds, and many speed readers find that to be much more ideal.
For relaxation of the eyes, and as a good way to re-orient yourself with the normal patterns of their use, after practicing these techniques, close your eyes, and move them up and down, side to side, and then open your eyes and perform the same motions. This is a good way to relax your eyes, and ensure that you are not straining them. Think about this like an end-of-workout stretch.
Hopefully this has given you some insight into how to exercise the eyes. If you would like more information on how to exercise the eyes, try visiting your eye doctor, since they can give you individualized plans that fit with your diagnosis.