Eye exercies part 2 - Accommodation and Tranaglyhps

20.12.2020

If you have not seen the first part of this series, look here. In the beginning stages of my training, apart from exercising with Brock string, I was also given an accommodation exercise and tranaglyphs. The training should not usually be longer than 30 minutes a day, as any longer can really overtrain you, making this not very beneficial.

What you want to do is to stimulate your eyes to improve, not to overwhelm them and make your whole visual system cave in from overtraining. In theory this is what might also be happening when being exposed to new tech while having heterophoria - your visual system is overwhelmed very fast and this new stimuli actually doesn't serve as training at all, but it might serve this purpose partially later when you are more advanced. One of my friends who has undergone the training noticed that he needs to keep his eyes under certain load (using new tech now) otherwise it seems like he starts to slowly lose the ability to tolerate it. This is something to still be explored.

Since in the beginning the Brock string exercises took around 20 minutes, I had 10 minutes left for other types of exercise. The accommodation exercise trains one eye at a time to have a faster accommodation response. Tranaglyphs then are a type of exercise that I do to this day and it's extremely useful in having a precise measure of progress as well as a large scale of difficulty that you can train on.


Accommodation exercise

For this exercise I have received three pairs of lenses with various strength and a printed table of simple words to read. The lenses simulate changing distance from your eye, as one makes the text look closer than it is, and the other one further than it is. It is therefore probably doable without the lenses as well, as long as you can find some way to keep changing the distance of the text you are reading with constant tempo and speed so your eyes have to change accommodation instantly. Alternatively you can buy a thing called accommodative flipper with various lens powers and use it with one eye at a time.

The point of the exercise in the beginning stages is to use one eye only, with the other ideally covered so well that no light gets in (and so binocular vision and fusion is not stimulated in any way). The training was as follows:

  • Lay the table 40 cm away from your eyes and take one lens in each hand.
  • Read the first word with the stronger lens, when it's sharp immediately switch to the other lens and wait again until it is clear, sharp and readable. Always make sure that this is the case after switching the lens.
  • Move on to the next word and repeat the same process.
  • Go this way through the whole table and check how long it took. At first it will be about 1:30 or longer, when it gets under one minute, use more advanced lenses.
  • Repeat the whole table with your other eye and do the whole exercise 3 times for each eye with 30 s break in between.

If you get a burning sensation in the eye that you are using for the exercise, you are doing it right. Two times a week an alternate version can be done:

  • Set timer to 1 min.
  • Gaze at only one word on the table and switch the lenses from one to another as fast as you can. Make sure sharp vision is reached after every switch of the lens.
  • Note how many times you have been able to switch lenses back and forth and read the word clearly each time in the given minute.

I have done these exercises in the beginning and when I moved to the last (3rd) pair of lenses and was able to get constantly under one minute on first exercise and to 40 words read on the second, I laid the whole exercise to rest and never returned to it. It was definitely the most annoying and exhausting exercise at the start, but it was essential in building proper accommodation that can later be used in binocular vision exercises.


Tranaglyphs

Tranaglyphs are an amazing exercise, but they require some tools and guidance to be done right. They can also be used for both esophoria and exophoria, as all you have to do is flip the glasses around to change which color covers which eye.

I keep doing this type of exercise to this day and it is also a great exercise to check your progress, or how well your newly gained abilities are holding up when you are not training for some time.

What you need for this exercise is the paper 3d glasses I mentioned in this article. Then you also need the tranaglyphs, which I have received in PDF form to be used on my computer. In here it gets a bit bizarre, as if you are bothered by modern computers and displays, this might seem counterproductive. I used an old laptop I know is of no issues to me and if you can do so, I recommend the same. Otherwise the tranaglyphs can also be printed and used by hand, however then the changing of the tranaglyphs during the exercise can be a bit more challenging. One user of ledstrain.org also programmed a very nice browser based exercise tool that you can use and set all the parameters you want.

The way tranaglyhps work is that each picture is in different color corresponding to the 3d glasses. Each picture is also properly offset. The point of this exercise is to separate your binocular vision, to have different input for each eye, and then to force your eyes to cooperate and join the separate images into one, creating a 3d image.

Tranaglyphs are trained in two ways - slow progression and jumps. Slow progression is when you start at a level where the tranaglyphs are almost merged, and as you click through the PDF they slowly distance each other with each new frame, forcing your eyes to either diverge and converge while still holding binocular fusion - seeing a singular 3d image. At some point the distance is too large and your eyes give up - binocular fusion is lost and the singular 3d image gets separated into two 2d images.

Jumps are based on the same principle, but instead of a slow progression, you have two PDF pages you switch between and where the tranaglyphs are close and far away from each other. This way you train more of an explosive power in your eyes instead of endurance like in the previous exercise.

I recommend doing this exercise after proper examination and under guidance to make sure you are doing it correctly, however if you would like to try you can download the easiest set of tranaglyphs I did at the beginning here:

Make sure to set the size of the PDF to 75% if you are on a 15in laptop and keep the distance at 50-60 cm away from the screen. On any other screen set it so it is approximately the same size. You can also use this documents size and intervals to adjust the online app the same way.

What's important here is to learn how to differentiate between whether you are training for convergence or divergence. Thankfully it's easy to find out:

  • When you have the glasses, gaze at the difficulty level of the tranaglyph that you can make into a singular 3d image.
  • Notice the inner and outer circle - which one seems closer to you spatially?
  • If the inner circle seems to be "popping out" of the image and closer to you, you are training convergence and your eyes are converged when seeing the 3d image.
  • If the inner circle seems "pushed in" to the image and farther away from you, your eyes are diverged when seeing the 3d image.

If you have a camera, you can also test this by setting it to record your eyes while you test these exercises. You will see that your eyes either converge or diverge and confirm that you are training for the correct problem - if you have trouble with eye convergence, you have to train bringing your eyes close to your nose while still maintaining binocular fusion. If you have trouble with divergence, the opposite has to be trained. I exercises for convergence and this was the last part of my first stage of training:

Slow progression

  • Before exercising with tranaglyphs and during the exercises, always make sure that you see both large circles, control circles on the sides, sharp center image, and that the whole image is indeed 3d. This is optimal perception. Usually the easiest to connect first are the outer circles, then the inner circles, and then the center cross or image. It can happen that you are able to connect the outer circles but you see the central image double. You should always make sure that when progressing, ideally all is connected including the center.
  • Set metronome on 45 bpm and make sure you see the first image fused and in 3d.
  • With each beat change to another frame, making the tranaglyphs travel further apart bit by bit making the binocular fusion more difficult.
  • At some point you might start losing sharp vision. Then the image will turn double and you will lose 3d vision.
  • Go back in the PDF until you see singular 3d image again.
  • Note both the point of when the image broke into two, and at which frame it was regained when going back again.
  • Repeat this three times with 30 s break in between.

Jumps

  • Set a timer to one minute.
  • Jump from the simpler version to the more difficult one and back as fast as you can. Always make sure that after each jump the image is 3d, sharp and all features are visible.
  • If you can make more than 30 changes a minute, switch to a more difficult version.
  • Repeat 3 times with 30 s break in between.

I have many PDFs with these tranaglyph exercises both for the slow progression and the jumps. The great thing about this exercise is that it is simple and always done the same way, the only thing that changes is how far away the tranaglyphs go from each other in both the progression and jumps. It is therefore the exercise that I have done since the beginning to this day, just using different PDFs. It's a great exercise to see your progress, as you can clearly see after some months that what seemed impossible at the start is now easy and second nature.

This is the first part of the exercise regimen that I have done in the beginning - Brock string, accommodation exercises and tranaglyphs in total of 30 minutes 6 days of a week.

I have to admit I did it wrong at the start, putting the 3d glasses on the opposite way, and therefore trained for convergence instead of divergence. I still did the Brock string and accommodation exercise correctly, but in tranaglyphs I saw no real progress in relation to my issue for 2 months and almost gave up until I realized the mistake. That is why it's important to make sure you are training what needs to be trained and ideally are guided by a proper specialist.

Doing the tranaglyphs the correct way is the first time I saw progress in relation to my headaches, as two weeks in of the correct way of the exercise I could all of a sudden use my digital camera display without pain. For some reason phones and laptops were still painful, but this sudden improvement in one area at least convinced me to keep going.

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If you would like to discuss this matter in person, feel free to book a consulting session with me. I will also be grateful for any donation to help me run this blog and my future research in this field.

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