When thinking about keeping your muscles toned, you don’t usually think about your eyes, but the eye is the most active and fastest working muscle in your entire body. And they’re extremely tough muscles at that. While you need to warm up your body’s muscles to get them prepped, your eyes are ready to rumble 24/7. While we’re not telling you to try to strap on mini weights to your eyelids and do a few reps in the mornings (no really, please don’t), it turns out regular exercise for your BODY can also reap benefits to your peepers.
Researchers have found that moderate intensity, low-impact exercise, like walking two to three times a week, may lower pressure on your optic nerves. Increasing pressure within the eyeball, or Glaucoma, causes irreparable damage to this nerve, so relieving that pressure with exercise could have a significant impact on your eye health.
Other studies discovered that not only do those brisk walks or runs decrease your risk of getting age-related cataracts, a LACK of physical activity may actually increase the likelihood of you getting them.
And still another 15-year study of over 4,000 older adults revealed that active people who exercised three or more times a week were less apt to get age-related macular degeneration (AMD). AMD is no joke. That’s when abnormal blood vessels grow beneath the retina and leak fluid and blood into the eye. Yeah, gross. And what’s even more upsetting is that AMD is the leading cause of irreversible vision loss in adults over 60.
The moral to this story: get moving and you’ll see clearly, better and longer!
Some Eye Fun Facts:
Eye muscles are 100 times stronger than they need to be.
We blink about 12 times every minute. There. You just did it.
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Photo Credit: Sergey Nivens / Shutterstock.com
