Movement Nugget: Eye training for better movement

Stimulating the cranial nerves might sound super science-y, but it’s actually a fascinating way to boost your brain-body connection.

Today we’re going to specifically look at Cranial Nerve 3 - the Oculomotor Nerve. It’s responsible for almost every eye movement. Why is this important?

Keeping images stationary

The oculomotor nerve helps keep images stationary on the retina by controlling the eyes’ movements and making sure they move together smoothly. Just imagine how discombobulating it would be if your visual imagery was bobbing up and down as you walk or if your eyes were moving in different directions. That’s why being able to fix your gaze (gaze fixation) is important.

Keeping eyes able to focus on a target and switching from one target to another quickly

The oculomotor nerve helps to adjust and coordinate eye position during movement. If it’s unable to do this well (sadly common in our modern day society but not normal for our brains), then your brain can potentially see this as a threat. As a consequence your brain can give you restricted range of movement or other undesirable outputs (e.g. dizziness, nausea). Two eye exercises which I’ve covered before called switch and stare can help stimulate and train this nerve:

An interesting benefit of stimulating Cranial Nerve 3 in the following way is that can help increase your flexor tone and increase your sympathetic tone (this can boost your alertness and energy). From a movement point of view, let’s say you would like to be able to reach your toes more easily in a forward fold. This requires hip flexion so we can test what your forward fold is like first without stimulating Cranial Nerve 3 and then stimulate it by doing the following exercise:

Converge your eyes to the space in between the eyebrows by having the eyes follow a target arm distance away and then slowly bringing it towards the eyebrows ensuring you don’t get a double image (as the brain sees this as a threat). Close the eyes, reset your target arm’s length away and bring it back towards the space between the eyebrows. Do this several times (20-30secs) and then retest your forward fold and see if it improved and felt easier.

As with all neural exercises whether this works for you or not is dependent on your unique nervous system and the ‘dosage’ of the exercise can also affect results. That’s why it’s important to test and retest to see if it worked for you.