Home Exercises - Smooth Convergence Treatment for Convergence Insufficiency

The orthoptist will tell you and/or show you in clinic how to carry out the exercises and tell you how long to do them for. They may also change the exercise just for you – please remember these are just basic instructions.

The orthoptist will also inform you how important it is to relax your eyes after the exercises.

Instructions

It is better if you get someone to read you these instructions as you do the exercise, to help you.

1. Keeping your head straight, hold a pen with your arm out straight in front of you in line with your eyes.

2. Focus on the top of your pen and make sure you can only see one pen and not two pens (double vision).

3. Move the pen slowly, nearer to your nose. Make sure as you’re doing this that the pen stays looking like one pen and is not changing into two pens.

4. If the pen changes into two and you start getting double vision, stop moving the pen and keep looking at it. Make your eyes work hard to ‘pull’ the two pens back together to look like one pen again. Once you see the pen as one, try to keep it looking like that while you count slowly to 10.

5. If you can’t make the pen look like one, even when you are trying your hardest, try moving the pen back a little bit (around 2cm). Now try and keep the pen looking like one pen at this distance, before starting again to bring the pen nearer to your nose, trying all the time to stop the pen looking like two pens.

Note: don’t go right back to the start each time the pen looks like two. You need to work hard around the area where the pen begins to split into two. This will make your convergence better (being able to ‘pull’ your eyes in without much effort).

6. Keep doing this exercise, stopping when you see two pens then trying to use your eyes to make the pen look like one again, before moving it closer.

7. While doing this exercise if you happen to notice you can see two (double vision) of other things around you, in front or behind your pen, do not worry. This is normal and it is called ‘physiological diplopia’. Just ignore it and remember to concentrate on the pen, making it look like one pen all of the time.

8. Remember to RELAX YOUR EYES after this exercise, this could be looking far away for 5-10 minutes or even closing your eyes for a few minutes.

• Try to make sure you try hard to pull your eyes in to look at the pen. It may feel as though you’re going ‘cross-eyed’ while doing this, but this is normal and needed to get good results.

• This exercise will get more difficult as the pen gets closer to your nose.

• As with any new form of exercise, your eyes may feel more tired and you may get eye ache when you first begin.

• Try not to make the pen look like one by closing one of your eyes or blinking. Try to blink normally throughout. Otherwise, this will not exercise the muscles.

• It is really important that you attend your appointments once exercises are started so we can see how you are getting on. This also allows us to change the exercises if it’s needed. If you can’t attend an appointment, please contact the team on the number below: 01253 953457